Monday, 18 March 2024

On the Ball

chosugo.gif



tama_big.gif
On the Ball


When I lived in Tokyo, I went to Tsukishima with my American boyfriend to eat monja-yaki (a savory pancake). It’s a taste of Tokyo’s old town, so I wanted to try it once while living in Tokyo.

When we arrived there, we were amazed. The street was crammed with monja-yaki restaurants.
Fascinated by this famous monja-yaki street in Tokyo, we wandered there. Suddenly, a middle-aged man riding on a plain bicycle crashed into me, almost intentionally. “Ouch!” I shouted, but he didn’t apologize. Instead, he shouted at me, “Hey, look where you are going! Don’t fool around with a blue-eyed guy!” “It was your fault! How rude of you!” I shouted back to him.

While the man’s verbal abuse was escalating, my boyfriend was also getting outraged, his face reddish. Suddenly, he shouted at the dirty old man in Japanese, although his Japanese wasn’t so good: “Anaaata!! TAMA naaai! (You!! No BALLS!!)” The man and I, as well as people watching our conflict, got frozen for a moment. My boyfriend continued loudly, now in English, which eventually overwhelmed the guy and made him apologize to me.

While we were eating monja-yaki, I asked my boyfriend, “Why did you say the guy didn’t have TAMA?” He told me that he just had literally translated the phrase “You don’t have any BALLS” (meaning “you don’t behave like a man”).

Maybe Universal