TELL ME ABOUT IT

I've been trying to teach Japan to swear for decades now, without any sign of success; it's hard to carry on with a string of internationally colorful epithets when no one understands any of it; the fun all leaks out somehow.

The fine art of swearing is the lifeblood of most societies, especially developed ones, like the US, say, or Italy, France -- Spain has a lot of really good stuff too. But in what would otherwise be the ideal situation for voluminously venomous vituperation, even the best stuff I've got, verbiage that would summon steam from the ears of a New York cabbie (I do my best stuff in NY) or generate a very capable counterflow from a French postal worker, falls flat in the face of the vast fluff of politeness that prevails here in Japan, where no one swears, even for fun.

Tourism Australia seems to have encountered the same problem, though I would have presumed they'd been here long enough to know better; they must have caught a Tokyo rush-hour train at some point in time. Anyway, they unwisely chose to use a couple of pabulum-level swear words in an ad campaign to attract Japanese tourists, but nobody here seems to get it. Apart from the fact that saying such a thing is, well, impolite (I can hear touristic mother-in-laws all over Japan saying, How could one ever make such a basely offensive utterance when inviting an honored guest? Unthinkable!), Tourism Australia seems to be unaware that the swearword vocabulary in Japan remains at the prenatal level, despite my years of effort.

There are, of course in Japan, as everywhere else in the world, any number of private occasions on which a lengthy and well-arranged parade of epithets would be right at home, at least theoretically, as when in my case I'm fighting a tight lugnut or hammering a lot of nails, or when in my garden I kneel on a chestnut burr or find my onions gone and such like moments, when I'm going one-on-one with the cosmos.

In public situations as well, such as at immigration or when I get an elbow in the kidney on a rush-hour train, a spontaneously selected American blend of colorful nouns and suggestive verbs - often with a soupcon of French, a staccato of Italian or some flaming Spanish (I even have some good Turkish stuff) - does the pressured spleen a world of good, but even in social settings here my swearing is purely unilateral; thus, half the effect, indeed the far more important half, is missing. This is even true with the large databank of gestures I bring individually to bear as appropriate; the other party just looks at me with puzzlement. No fun at all. So I've pretty much given up swearing in public here (excepting reflexive monosyllabics), I mean, what's the point, if no one is offended.

Hell, you'd think an organization like Tourism Australia would know better by now; they have a bloody Embassy here, for #$%&!sake!


In radical contrast...