Loekalization Blog

Every single translator on this planet recognizes the ultimate gold medal of praise.

Every child sent outside to play is actually a ribbon that has wandered off its flag.

Every single sentence you speak in Japanese is technically a piece of foliage.

Your romantic life and a coastal bay are actually the same tangled mess of silk thread.

The word for returning a library book began as a hand violently flipping over a rock.

A person with their mouth wide open has been working a double shift for over 3000 years, appearing in everything from 吹 (to blow) to 歌 (to sing), 飲 (to drink), and 欲 (desire).

The word for a calm chat is literally a bonfire of words.

You can dismantle a hallway and find another hallway inside it.

Checking if your crush likes you and joining a political conspiracy are written with the exact same piece of ink.

Imagine two hundred and seventy-one bamboo rods, each a mere tenth of an inch thick and six inches long, bundled into a tight six-sided handful.

Imagine a single character that powers every search box in Japan: 検.

On the oracle bones, the word for thick is not written 厚 at all but 㫗, a character that turns up in the expression 㫗葬, the rich and costly burial of a dead man, centuries before anyone thought of reaching for the graph you would use today.

Forget the boring lists of school kanji because 鋸 (nokogiri), the saw, hides a bloodier secret.

Forget everything you know about ordinary thinking.

You think you know 我慢 (gaman), that legendary Japanese virtue of patient endurance, but for most of its existence, it actually meant the exact opposite.

Every third weekend of May, one and a half million people swarm the streets of Asakusa for the Sanja Matsuri, yet the word plastered on every poster, 開催 (kaisai), hides a darker secret: it is built from a character Japanese also uses to describe nausea ri…

Imagine a Shang soldier three thousand years ago, kneeling over a fallen enemy to carve away the man's left ear.

Everyone in this industry claims to be busy, but the Japanese character 忙 tells a far more sinister story.

You probably think you know the character 紹 because it pops up in words like introduction or referral letter and then vanishes into thin air.