Musume wa buruuberii ni! (int.)I've got a blueberry for a daughter!
Over the weekend I overcame my fear of Japanese movie ticket prices and went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in Kabukicho. Because it's a family film, some theaters in Tokyo, including the one I went to, are showing only the Japanese dubbed version (because let's face it: kids hate to read! Reading's HARD!). So I'm afraid that some of what I'm sure was a very funny performance by Johnny Depp may have been lost in translation.
FUN TRIVIA FACT: The songs in the film were also translated into Japanese, rather to my surprise. The Oompa Loompa song about Violet Beauregarde, however, has a slight change which I found funny for some reason: Where the original lyrics go, "Chewing, chewing, on and on," the Japanese version goes, "Chewing, chewing, all day." The idea is that most Japanese people can probably understand the meaning of "all day," since "all" and "day" are relatively common loan words from English to Japanese. "On and on," however, would have Japanese audiences scrambling for their electronic dictionaries in mid-movie.
Speaking of scrambling for electronic dictionaries! Also this weekend, Girlfriend and I went to Nakano to take the classroom component of the PADI Scuba Diving License. It began with a boring 90-minute video about air density and nitrogen bubbles (annoyingly, the video was originally in English, but had been converted to Japanese by dubbing all the voices and covering all the text...make me work, why dontcha), and ended with a 50-question multiple choice test. It was my first time to take a test of any kind in Japanese, and it was stressful. But I passed after all, and now the hard part's over. Next month we will make a brief escape to Guam for the purpose of completing our training and becoming true Jedi, I mean, recreational scuba divers. And, as a special bonus, I have learned the Japanese words for "buoyancy," "back-up second stage regulator" and "the bends."
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