Japanese Slang (4 page)

•   
Isage yo! Shita de Kawasaki no kutsuharakachiya om
no koto matteru ze!
Hurry up! That heister from Kawasaki is waiting downstairs for you!

•   
Goji ni rei no konkurusarubisa to au tehazu da.
We're supposed to meet that heister guy at five.

After World War II, downtown Tokyo gangs had
become ethnically even more diverse as hordes of eager Chinese youths spilled out of the tightly knit Chinatowns of Yokohama and Osaka. Both Japanese and Korean gangsters were charmed by the exotic vocabularies these new conscripts brought with them. Breaking into a house was given the pounding name
h
koyau
(banging at the furnace), which was inspired by the Japanese burglary words
tonton
(bang bang) and
kanamono
(ironmongery). The new secret words for burglar were
honpa
(from
heng pa,
“unconscionable snatcher”),
chiin-chende
(hard-cash-taker) and
yauchienu
(from
yao qien,
“wanting money”).
Chiipaishu'ende
became the alternative word for sneak thief, and
nink
t
(he who leaves no traces) was reserved for cream-of-the-crop master thieves.

•   
Shinmai no h
koyau umaku yatteru kai?
How's your new ironmonger working out?

•   
Ano honpa itsumo hitori de shigoto o yaru no sa.
You know, that unconscionable snatcher always works alone.

•   
Ore wa tekkiri ana chiin-chende wa kono hen no koto shitteru to omottan da ga n
!
Man, I thought that hard-cash-taker knew the neighborhood!

•   
Oi, chotto kore mite miro yo! Kono ate wa
saka no nink
t
kara te ni ireta mono da ze!
Yo, take a look at this one! I got this door jagger from an Osaka pro!

Along with ethnic diversity came the initial wave of lock-picking and safe-cracking burglaresses. The first female mob bosses had begun ruling their streets with an iron fist, buying, selling, and even marrying
their way up the violently masculine hierarchy of the Japanese underworld. In 1982 the struggle for criminal gender empowerment reached new heights when the gentle and soft-spoken Taoka Fumiko maneuvered herself onto the throne of Japan's largest and most powerful mob-syndicate, the Yamaguchi gang. With the first signs of equal employment opportunity, the toughest and most belligerent women mingled with their local sneak thief crowd and soon began acquiring their
ownsanyabukuro
(widget bags), in which they could neatly arrange their own tools of the sneak-thieving trade:
koburi
(master keys),
harigane
(wire-jiggers),
neji
(crowbars),
h
ch
(“kitchen cleavers,” or lock-breaking wrenches), and
aka
(“red,” or blow torch). This first generation of female professional burglars has been given a jargon name of Chinese gang extraction,
b
(the maternal ones).