Chapter 5 of Fight Club is another scene from the testicular cancer support group. At the start of the scene Thomas, one of the members, is telling the group how his ex-wife had her first child (with her new husband). In English, we usually say that a woman “has” a baby and that the baby “is born”. The non-passive form of “is born”, “bear”, isn’t often used in speech. “Last week my wife bore a baby.” It sounds pretty strange, doesn’t it?

When talking about birth in Japanese, I usually hear the passive form too. The Japanese for “to be born” is 生まれる (umareru). There is a non-passive form 生む (umu) which means “to bear”, but I don’t often hear it in Japanese, at least not in relation to human birth. But in Fight Club, they use 生む (in the past tense 生んだ [unda]).

ミンディーは先週子供を生んだんだよ。 [sound file]

Mindii wa senshuu kodomo o undanda yo.

Lit: Last week Mindy bore a child.

When my wife and I had our baby last September, nobody used the word 生む (umu) with us to talk about the birth. Instead they would use the passive form or a more formal word 出産する (shussan suru) which means “to give birth, to deliver”. People outside of the family would use the even more formal ご出産 (goshussan). “Go” is a prefix added to some words to make them extremely polite. There is no equivalent of this sort of extreme politeness in English. I suspect Thomas gets away with using 生む since he is talking informally about his ex-wife.

Opening Your Heart

Another cool thing I picked up was the phrase 心を開く (kokoro o hiraku), as in the following:

ここにいるみんなもトーマス君の勇気を見習って欲しい。　自分の心を開くんだ。 それでは、パートナーを選んで。 [sound file]

koko ni iru minna mo Thomas-kun no yuuki o minaratte hoshii. Jibun no kororo o hirakunda. Soredewa, paatonaa o erande

Lit: I want everybody here to follow Thomas’s example. Open your heart. Okay, find a partner.

心 (kokoro) is hard to translate, but it means something like “heart, spirit, mind”. 開く　(hiraku) means “to open”. “Open your heart” has the exact same connotation in Japanese as it does in English: to speak your mind freely without inhibitions. I always get surprised when little idiomatic phrases like this match exactly between languages. If anybody knows of other languages that use “open your heart” to mean this same idea, let me know!

Japanese Giants

No, not the baseball team. Bob.

こうして僕はあの大男と出会った。 [sound file]

koushite boku wa ano oootoko to deatta.

Orig: And this is how I met the big moosie.

One of my favorite Japanese words (maybe #2 after 牛肉) is 大男 (oootoko). The first character means “big” and the second character means “man”, so together you get “big man”. Pretty simple. It’s one of the few Japanese words with three o’s in a row, which to me makes it hilarious to say. It’s like you are dumbstruck with fascination. OHH! A giant! I actually got called this one time at the elementary school I work at. Great word.

Red Strangers

Bob tells Jack about the problems in his life: his use of steroids, his divorce, his bankruptcy. In the English version of Fight Club, Jack thinks to himself: “Strangers with this kind of honesty make me do a big rubbery one.” Here is the Japanese:

赤の他人たちの正直の告白は僕の心を揺さぶった。 [sound file]
aka no tanin-tachi no shoujiki no kokuhaku wa boku no kokoro o yusabutta.

Lit: The honest confessions of red strangers moved my heart.

赤 (aka) is red, 他人 (tanin) is stranger. What is a red stranger? Unlike 心を開く above, this idiom doesn’t exist in English. My monolingual dictionary tells me that 赤の他人 means まったくの他人. まったくの means something like “complete” or “total”. A red stranger is a complete stranger. A total stranger. Didn’t know that before. But why red?

I looked up red in my dictionary, and for the fourth definition it has:

名詞の上に付けて、「まったくの」「すっかり」「あきらかな」の意味を表す語。

trans: A word that when placed above [ed: in vertical writing. for horizontal writing, you'd say "before"] a noun, gives the meaning of “complete”, “entirely” or “clear/obvious”

It gives the following example words:

• 赤裸 (akahadaka) completely naked or buck naked
• 赤恥 (akahaji) complete shame/humiliation

I wonder if Chinese uses the character 赤 to express this kind of meaning too. Any Chinese speakers want to help me out?

Red Babies

Speaking of red, the word most people use for baby in Japanese is 赤ちゃん (aka-chan). “-chan” is a suffix that you add to someone’s name to make it diminutive. It’s similar to calling someone named Thomas “Tommy”, or Michael “Mikey”. 赤ちゃん (aka-chan) might mean something like “little red one”. I always thought that 赤ちゃん (aka-chan) was the original word, but it is actually the cutesy way to say 赤ん坊 (akanbou), which is the un-diminutivized word for baby.

While talking to Bob one-on-one at the support group, Jack breaks down and cries. Somehow this letting go and crying cures him of his insomnia:

赤ん坊よりも眠った。 [sound file]
akanbou yorimo nemutta.

Lit: I slept better than a baby.

Putting aside the fact that the writers obviously have never taken care of a baby and therefore don’t realize that babies are extremely light sleepers who wake up several times in the night screaming for milk, this is a great sentence. By the way, if you are wondering why the Japanese call babies “red”, it’s because Japanese babies’ skin turns tomato-red when they cry. It’s actually pretty amazing to see.

That’s all for this chapter. The next chapter is really short, but we get to go all New Agey. Don’t miss it! Subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Topics for next time:

• Imagine your pain as a white ball of healing light.
• Power animals
• Resurrection

Chapter 5 Total Running Time: 3m 47s

Chapter 5 New Words: 46
Project Mayhem Total Running Time: 10m 07s
Project Mayhem Total New Words: 130

Previous Project Mayhem posts:

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4

Related posts:

1. Chapter 2: How to Say Testicular Cancer in Japanese
2. Chapter 4 – Swedish Furniture and Katakana Loanwords
3. Chapter 3 – Japanese Men Mumble
4. Japanese Magic Bottle
5. Japanese Snowmen

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