Japanese artist goes on trial over "vagina selfies"

[NickSay]

Protecting the people of Japan from this menace - way to go!

[petzl]

As Japan has annual Shinto penis festivals, this kind of seems like a double standard:

[ChuckV]

Scoff if you like, but what would you do…

[anon97461063]

@Cynical

I don’t think 中 can be read as “ko”; jisho.org lists “ata.ru”, “uchi” and “naka” as the kunyomi and “chuu” as the sole onyomi.

I thought this might be. I use Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC for random stuff I don’t remember precisely. I personally have only heard the ones you list, like 故障中 (koshouchuu) for out of order and 通勤中 (tsuukinchuu) for in commute, outside the common “naka” and “uchi”. It seemed strange to me, but since I can understand generally what she is saying and read the Japanese subtitles, I can do simple pairing and saw that’s how they were spelling “manko”, using that kanji.

And yes- totally dislexia-ed that one (D’oh)- mannaka means “right in the middle (of something)”. I was thinking of inaka to mean middle of nowhere, but in the colloquial use common in Japan to mean “middle of nowhere”. Inaka literally means the countryside, but is often used in the manner of “the boonies, hell’s half acres, middle of nowhere, etc”. Fixed that in original post- it’s been awhile.

@Cynical

I don’t think there’s a kanji for the term in question either; you might have more luck with more medical terminology but it’s hard to imagine that there would be an explicit kanji for such a colloquial term.

Yeah, that was kinda my initial thought.

I don’t get to use my degree much anymore actively in machining and watchmaking- I keep up on it by (you’ll laugh & facepalm) watching anime of all things. Just hearing speech every week keeps my ability usable.

@Cynical

My best guess would be that most Japanese people would read まん中 as “mannaka” but it means “right in the middle”, with the joke being that because the first part is in hiragana (like the word manko) rather than written 真中, she is making an innuendo about the middle of her vulva, which is where she is sitting in the picture. I think the word you were thinking of was 田舎 (inaka)…

Yep. What we have here is indeed one of those intentionally ironic/art readings, which the Japanese are quite fond of doing. Certain spoken words will be intentionally misspelled when written in a number of different ways for the sake of trendiness/fashionability, comedy, or artistic licence. Kind of a forced pun, but no one normally questions such things, other than to discuss the person’s interpretation of the term for fun. It’s not something that people actively correct when you can tell it’s done intentionally. Thus this example is actually pretty funny and gross to Japanese at the same time, I imagine.

This phenomenon is actually pretty common- but unless it’s really obvious (they often put the normal spelling in parenthesis after examples), I don’t normally pick up on it. It’s something you kind of have to have native level fluency to recognize on less common terms- and since “manko” is a very uncommon term to hear even in live speech, I’d never seen it in writing in anything other than specifically katakana until now. Hence the misunderstanding.

Good catch man! Now that I re-think her usage, even her speech explaining her thoughts is an active form of art protest. I don’t know of any correlation to this behavior in English, but I have seen this done many times before now that I see what she is doing there.

Cynical- I’d love to hear your background in Japanese. Knowing the terms onyomi & kunyomi alone shows you have studied.

Japanese- the only language with 3 separate “alphabets”, 42 currently used unique pronunciations of said “letters” with several dead archaic sounds no longer used, and one of the “alphabets” is technically a modified foreign language- Chinese. To say it’s still challenging after getting a degree in it is a ridiculous understatement!

[Nelsie]

I am reminded that the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki has often featured genitalia in his photos. There’s a tryptich with a fishhead juxtaposed with a manko and a close-up view of an act of fellatio, for example, that’s quite well-known. And then there’s all the pictures with toy dinosaurs (and women in various states of dishabille) in them. Plus the occasional stray labia that shows up here and there.

Does Araki get a pass for photographing mainly in monochrome, or for being a man, or for being less twee, or what?