Pun for the Punnies
04/13/2007 @ 12:00 pm
So I was hanging out in Shirakawa when I saw this sign hanging outside a store. I was told it’s a pun of sorts. Any guesses? I’m particularly curious to hear from you translators out there. The answer after the jump.
The kanji are: Spring, Summer and Winter. In other words, “Autumn” is missing. Usually people say, “aki ga nai,” or “there is no Autumn” when examining the sign. But “Aki” also sounds like the word for “open.” So, said outloud, a person reading this sign might sound as though she is saying, “There is no open.” Which means that the store, is closed. Punny enough for you?
Thanks for posting this, lifted my day.
..a jar?….(good post Marie).
April 13th, 2007 at 12:40 pmIn fact it’s a kind of pun. Autum is missing, so “No autum (Aki nai)” ,under that commes the Kanji “in(中:Naka)”,which can be also pronounced as “Chu”.
So it means “Aki-Nai-Chu” (商い中). In other words,it means “We are open” or “business as usual”.
I first saw this sign in Hakone. Seems to be a quite famouse “Dajare” among shop managers.
April 13th, 2007 at 3:05 pmSuper bit of word play, that.
April 13th, 2007 at 4:17 pmSome of the game shows on tv have sections with riddles like this. It’s a superb way to study the language.
When I saw the same “missing season” formation on a teacup in a Japanese restaurant in Honolulu and asked about it, the waitress had to go ask someone else then came back to explain that the “akinai” means 飽きない ‘won’t give up’, ‘keep on trucking’, etc. She might also have suggested this pun and slogan was more common in Osaka.
April 14th, 2007 at 1:31 amShouldn’t that be “akiramenai” if it were “won’t give up”?
Glad you all enjoyed the pun. Of course, Tomojiro had an unfair advantage!
I’m with you on those game shows, Overoften. They are amazing and I always feel like a very, very slow child watching them. The funny thing is that I love word games in English; we often do the Sunday Crossword Times Puzzle together. And I like Scrabble. Japanese is in some ways even more interesting and creative with puns and word play.
April 14th, 2007 at 6:27 am