So here's a weird example of how my mind works.
Last evening I drove out to downtown Beaverton and watched the 2009 anime film "Summer Wars". It was great popcorn, gorgeously animated in the best anime style, and hit all the mange/anime-lover (i.e. me...) buttons; high school romance/angst, family drama, high-tech danger, goofy secondary characters, samurai, squid, baseball. It's fun.
After the show I went and looked it up and was unsurprised that the director was the same person who did "Belle", the gorgeous anime version of Beauty and the Beast that my daughter took us too several years ago.
Well done, Hosoda-san.
Anyway, as I was reading I was a bit bugged by the title.
Yes, it's about a war (well, "cyber-war") and it takes place over two days in summer, so, "summer wars", fine.
But.
The Japanese title is "サマーウォーズ in katakana, which is "Hepburnized" in the Wiki as "Samā Wōzu".
Okay, now; because I'm me (and do military history and martial sports that have Japanese connections) I'm very familiar with the Japanese word for "war".
And it's not "Wozu", it's 戦争, "Sensō".
I tried looking for some sort of katakana or hirigana versions that could be translated as "wozu".
Nope.
Then I plugged the katakana title directly into romaji, and Dr. Google gave me this: "Samāu~ōzu".
That's also not "war"; indeed, try and look up "ozu" and all you you get is either a place name or a personal/family name. All the other links went directly back to the film, suggesting that the katakana don't mean "summer wars" in the general sense of "wars fought during the summer" but specifically "the movie "Summer Wars".
So now I'm baffled; is the title some sort of phonetic "English"? "Summer" ("sama") "Wars" ("wozu") invented just for the flick? If so...why? Why not just call it 夏戦争; "Natsu Sensō", "Summer War(s)"? Is there some particular reason or meaning for naming it the way they did?
I'm now hooked and I want to know.
Doesn't make the flick any less fun; indeed, now I want to know more about the movie.
And that's so me.
Sad, but there it is.
4 comments:
As controlled a language as Japanese might be sometimes, there is less consistency around Romanization and loan-words generally... seems to be a popular culture thing: some words still in use make no sense without context, e.g. "hai-kara" which means stylish but dates from a Europeanized style of formal dress in the late Meiji and is drawn from "high collar", referring to the shirts. Other words get run together, like "moga" a Taisho Era word referring to a woman who followed Western styles and thought and is drawn from "moderunu gyaru" or modern girl, or "masukomi", run together from "mass communications". Sometimes it goes the other way too: during World War II, baseball which had become popular in the 30s was still played but its name changed from "bei-isu-boru" to "yakyu" or "9-man game".
I think in the case of this anime, they picked the title because it sounded cool or different.
That's kind of my guess, too; that it's meant to be a sort of "cool/hip" way of saying "summer wars" by making it into English-sounding phrases rather than the literal Japanese. But there's so many ways to do that - kanji, hiragana, katakana, furigana - and the katakana they used was so odd that I couldn't be sure, and it bugged me that I couldn't...
AI interpretation: "The title "Summer Wars" reflects the film's themes of conflict and resolution during a summer family gathering, where personal and digital battles unfold. It symbolizes the clash between the real world and a virtual reality, emphasizing the importance of family and connection amidst chaos."
Which is the most "AI" thing I can imagine; it blathers on about the "why is it called "Summer Wars" when it's, like, it's a war in the summer, no duh. But my question is "why isn't it called "Summer Wars" in actual Japanese instead of this weird phonetic sorta-English "soma wozu" thing?" for which the AI hasn't a clue (because it seems like nobody outside the author/director knows).
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