1.Prologue: Behind the Scenes
Our theme for this episode was #Summer______. We featured a variety of summer-related hashtags, including #SummerBreak, #SummerSolstice, #SummerGoals, #SummerRuined, and more.
So far on the show we’ve usually narrowed our focus to a single central theme, and introduced a number of tweets that include that hashtag. On this episode, we wanted to look at all the ways Americans spend their summer break as a whole, so instead of narrowing (or more accurately, broadening) our focus to #summer or #SummerBreak, we decided to feature a range of different hashtags offering differing insights into the summer experience.
Our English teacher for this week, Naito-sensei, donned an “aloha" (or Hawaiian) shirt for this episode. He taught us words like “humid", “sticky", “scorching", “sizzling", while photos flashed on the screen with Naito-sensei himself acting out each adjective. This was an idea the director had, and judging from the response online after the show aired, it was a hit with our audience as well. There are plenty of other English expressions for fall, winter, and spring, and I hope on those occasions we have the pleasure of seeing a continuation of the Naito-sensei photo series.
There was also a bit at the beginning where we cut to Naito-sensei just as he was in the middle of a brain freeze from eating shaved ice too quickly. Because of the ice, the staff had to time everything just right—the preparation of the shaved ice, and when they brought it out to Naito-san. Lately I’ve come to realize that when you’re watching it all unfold on the TV screen it seems like something so basic, but behind the scenes a lot of elements have to sync up for that to actually happen as planned.
2.The Season of Summer Break
In Silicon Valley in California where I was born and raised, the climate is moderate all year round. The seasons aren’t clearly defined; at some point you realize that the suns rays are beating down on you, and some time later you realize that it’s getting a little chilly. So as a kid, I did not have a real sense that summer was a season caused by the tilt of the Earth’s axis and its revolution around the sun. Instead, summer referred the span of time during which we were on break from school. Summer was not a season between spring and fall, rather, it was the season of summer break. And summer break was about 10 to 11 weeks long—practically 1/4 of a year. So it was only natural that it felt like a season unto itself.
So how did a California kid in the 90s spend that season? Those who lived near the ocean went to the ocean, while those who were more inland went to pools and water parks. (California is often synonymous with the West Coast, but in terms of west-to-east distance, the state is about 1.5 times wider than Honshu, Japan’s main island. It can take quite a while to reach the ocean for someone who lives inland.) There was also an amusement park near where I lived, and I had friends who would buy season passes and actually go to ride rollercoasters everyday.
And the place American children would go to get away from their parents was summer camp. There was a wide range of summer camp programs, from the outdoors to sports to math and science, as well as faith-based camps, camps for those in need, and camps for the disabled.
Teenagers would get away from their parents by going to the mall. And there were many ways for a kid to have fun at the mall: people watching, killing time at the arcade, hanging out at the foot court, going into a store, filling up a shopping cart and then just leaving it there, buying a ticket for one movie and actually seeing several. You figured out how to have fun. Side note, kids who spent all their time at the mall were known as “mall rats".
In any case, because summer break is so long, you inevitably end up spending a considerable amount of time sitting idly at home, staring off into space. Especially until you’re old enough to get a driver’s license. In English we call this “bored to death" (死ぬほど退屈である). When I was a kid, I remember spending a lot of time being bored to death.
In this day and age, where smartphones have become so ubiquitous, I feel that kids don’t get enough chances to experience staring off into space or feeling like they’re dying of boredom. And with more neighborhoods not as safe as they once were coupled with the growing scourge of the helicopter parent, kids don’t get to play outside as much as they used to. The spread of smartphones has robbed something precious from these kids. It’s ironic that as the world becomes a more convenient place, it has increasingly become harder for kids to just be kids.
They say that in order for a kid’s imagination to develop, it’s important for them to be able to spend some time just staring off into space. Be that as it may, three months is much too long by any standard. When American teenagers growing up in the city or in the suburbs run out of things to do, what recourse do they have but to cause mischief (and sometimes, crime), or experiment with something like weed? There were a number of times where a friend would have such mind-expanding experiences over the summer and come back after break as someone that I no longer recognized.
●Films about American summer
3.My Wardrobe This Week
●A Word About Undershirts
I sweat quite a bit, so for a long time I couldn’t decide whether an undershirt made it better or worse. When I brought this up with Scarlet, she explained to me that a dress shirt was essentially underwear. No matter how hot it is outside, the idea is that you will not be taking off your jacket. Of course, given Japan’s hot and humid climate, it’s become commonplace for businessmen to go “cool biz” style and wear a dress shirt with no jacket. But even so, Scarlet said, it would be odd to wear underwear underneath underwear.
For someone who wears a dress shirt to work every day, an undershirt may be a way to reduce the frequency with which you have to launder your dress shirts. But again, if you think of a dress shirt as underwear, you should be changing shirts every day.
There may be those who have a job where wearing an undershirt is simply more practical. If so, the one thing you want to avoid is having your undershirt be visible through the fabric of your dress shirt. Walk around any Tokyo business district in summer and you’ll see middle-aged salarymen everywhere clearly sporting a tank top underneath their dress shirts. For some, an undershirt may be a way to prevent your nipples from showing through a cheap shirt, but if that is the case, I recommend dishing out the extra cash to buy a dress shirt in the 7,000 yen range. It’s worth it, trust me.
Sometimes, I’ll see someone trying to pass of a plain t-shirt as an undershirt. But t-shirts are made with thicker fabric than an undershirt, and that t-shirt shows. And if you’re going without a necktie and opening that top button, you get the unseemly t-shirt collar sticking out from underneath your dress shirt. Instead, get an undershirt in a U-neck or V-neck. In terms of color, stick with plain white or skin-colored. Wearing a black t-shirt with a printed design would be a major no-no. Wearing a U-neck or V-neck undershirt by itself is an even bigger one.
Incidentally, the Japanese call dress shirts “wai-shatsu”, which is technically wasei-eigo, an English term coined in Japan. Apparently the “wai” is short for “white”. (“Shatsu” is the katakana transliteration of “shirt”.) And I’d always assumed “wai” was “Y” to indicate the shape of the collar and placket. (How embarrassing.)
Pink socks by Tabio
4:Epilogue: Breaking Down #SunsOutBunsOut
I’d never thought I’d be talking about the hashtag/phrase #SunsOutBunsOut on our show. This phrase essentially means that summer has arrived—the ladies are wearing their bikinis on the beach and showing off their toned bodies.
Japanese readers will immediately picture the round pieces of bread that sandwich the patty and other toppings of hamburger. “Buns" is a term for round bread, but due to the resemblance in shape, the term is also an informal way to refer to the buttocks. A “bun" can also refer to a hairstyle, as in “tie your hair in a bun". A man with a similar hair style has a “man bun", an expression that connotes questionable sexiness. If you ask me, this is a reflection of the differences between Japanese and American food cultures. In Japan, the simile of choice for buttocks is a peach (もも); hair buns are referred to as dango, a rice dumpling (だんご). If the Japanese fairy tale Momotaro (“peach boy") were written by an American, surely the protagonist would have been born from a hamburger bun. And the folk tale Odango Korokoro would have been titled “Buns Korokoro".
Here I’d like to point two things out to our English-language learners in Japan. The Japanese transliteration of this noun is バンズ, or buns—in other words, there is no katakana version of bun, singular. But before a hamburger bun is split into two, it is, of course, a bun, singular. Once it is sandwiching the patty and toppings, it is (two) buns, plural. Katakana loanwords often leave it very vague as to whether or not something is singular or plural. (Differentiating between singular and plural is also one of the most difficult things when translating Japanese to English.) My second point is that the “suns" in #SunsOutBunsOut does not refer to multiple suns. It is actually sun’s, or sun is. (Hashtags cannot include apostrophies, commas, periods, asterisk, and other symbols.) English-language learners using social media to study have to pay extra close attention to notice these types of things.
Side note, the male equivalent of “sun’s out, buns out", where men wear tank tops or swimsuits to show off their toned bodies, is “sun’s out, guns out". And no, guns does not refer to anything X-rated—it refers to a man’s biceps. Despite the fact that scholars say the etymology is unrelated, it’s interesting to note that in English, a person has an arm, but they can also carry arms.
