I’m interested in the mechanisms by which English words or phrases become adapted into the phraseology of native Japanese speakers. For things like baseball as “beisuboru” or Merry Christmas as “Merii Kurusamusu” the origins are fairly obvious – the concepts referred to didn’t exist in Japan until they were brought with Western Influence in the 19th and 20th centuries so it made sense to use the foreign word for the foreign thing. We do this in English too of course with words like sushi, origami and karaoke.
Most recently the one I’ve been curious about is the exclamation “Oh my God!” pronounced more or less the same way except that the final “d” sound is often omitted. There is no direct translation as invoking a deity to express shock isn’t really a thing in Shinto or Buddhism. I may have just answered my own question but when I heard characters shouting the phrase in anime like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Tokyo Revengers I wondered if there had been a specific English language television show or movie behind the utterance’s recent surge in popularity.
I’d read about the incident that kick started the adoption of the repeated word in the title but for those who haven’t I’ll give a brief summary. In postwar Japan the popular fashion for juvenile hoodlums was based on preppy American Ivy League styles. While this might read like one of the bizarrely costumed gangs in A Clockwork Orange there are two things to keep in mind to help it make more sense.
First off in the years immediately following the Japanese Surrender Western clothing had not yet become the official uniform of the white collar “salaryman” and the early adopters were seen as a sign of societal decay. Secondly the styles aren’t incredibly different from the later “mod” movement in England. In fact one of the names followers of the subculture gave themselves was “mobo” – a shortening of “modern boys”.
This brings us to the “Oh Mistake!” incident of 1950. As being on the cutting edge of fashion often is dressing like a “mobo” was incredibly expensive. Western garb would have been impossible to find second hand and had to be made by custom tailors. VAN Jacket, the first “Ivy League” style Japanese clothing brand, didn’t launch until a year later in 1951. Even then the store was so far outside the buying power of the average working class young man that its stickers were often stuck to empty rice bags and carried around to create the illusion of being able to afford shopping there.
This makes it easy to imagine the motivation of Hiroyuki Namigawa, a “mobo” who worked as a parking attendant at Nihon University, when he robbed a coworker at knife point and made off with the vehicle and nearly 2 million yen. He hid out afterwards in his girlfriend’s apartment but it only took the police two days to track him down. Presumably he was trying to pass for a nisei, a foreign born Japanese person who doesn’t know the language, when he shouted out the two words that would take the nation by storm:
“Oh mistake!”
As always this is all background for the personal anecdote I’m going to start getting into now. LaPorsha and I had our wedding on July 5, 2014 on the outskirts of Tijuana and decided to travel to San Luis Obispo’s Madonna Inn for the honeymoon. Madonna Inn is famous for brightly colored themed rooms like the image in this piece’s header and neither of us had ever been before.
This presented something of an obstacle as we wouldn’t buy our first vehicle together, a diesel Mercedes, until after working the trim season toward the end of that same year. Presumably there is a bus or train that connects San Luis Obispo to Los Angeles but that isn’t what we went with. I forget how we made the trip from Tijuana to San Francisco but from there we took a bus to a friend of LaPorsha’s in Half Moon Bay with the intention of completing the trip by hitchhiking.
In my handful of years of hitchhiking experience I had learned that finding rides was much easier with a female companion. On every one of these journeys though the women I travelled with were white or white passing and I was still learning the kaleidoscope of ways that race always makes a difference. It wasn’t as hard as trying to hitch by myself but things were extremely slow going.
The first ride might not even have picked us up until the second day but eventually a pair of friendly hippies in a camper van got us down to Monterey. Early the following morning a talkative mom brought us into Big Sur. We were in her car for less than ten minutes but she abruptly opened up about her struggles with stealing her young son’s prescribed Adderall. There’s a certain kind of woman that always seems to view LaPorsha as a confessor and immediately start unburdening themselves in her presence.
From there we somehow ended up at the exit just outside a popular spiritual retreat called Esalen Institute. I think we might have gotten a ride from Big Sur from somebody who worked there as a cook. They probably thought we would have an easier time finding a ride South from a departing student but we were at that exit for a really long time. As much as I’m struggling to remember exact details from all of these rides I feel like I can vividly recall exactly how the trees, cliffs and ocean looked from the piece of shoulder we had to wait at.
It might have even been a departing cook who gave us the next ride. The only part I feel confident about was that this ride took us all the way through to Cambria. I know a girl named Mika who grew up in this town and the name always reminds of the Pre-Cambrian era of geologic history, once thought to predate the beginnings of even the simplest life forms, but I’d never been to the place myself. Our ride into town is also the only time I remember getting a glimpse of Hearst Castle.
We were pretty hungry by this point and went into a place called J.J.’s Pizza. Cambria was in the throes of a water crisis – the town’s wells and aquifers had run dry and it isn’t anywhere near any rivers or other sources of fresh water. It looks like they were able to have the Army Corps of Engineers construct a desalination plant later in the same year we were there but this seems to have caused environmental issues and may no longer be in use.
There were signs in the pizza restaurant explaining that water would only be brought to customers that specifically ordered it and everyone had to be conscientious about needlessly wasting it. The only other patrons inside the establishment were a family of Japanese tourists in colorful outdoor gear. They were drinking fountain cokes and there was a situation because the husband had accidentally drank from his wife’s straw and now she wanted an entirely new soda.
I’m not sure if they didn’t understand the signs about the water crisis or didn’t realize that soda fountains start with local fresh water before adding carbonation and syrup. I guess it all comes down to a cultural difference I still don’t entirely grasp the depth of, judging by their two children they had clearly shared more than a straw, but apparently his blunder had crossed a boundary of cleanliness which rendered the cup of soda entirely undrinkable.
The serving person was equally incredulous. They offered a fresh straw but couldn’t seem to wrap their head around the situation requiring an entirely different soda either. By way of explanation the husband blurted out the popular English catch phrase while his wife quietly admonished him in their native tongue:
“Mistake! Mistake!”
Eventually the server either replaced the soda or brought it into the back and poured it into a fresh cup without a straw to create the illusion of replacement. I hadn’t yet read about the famous “Oh mistake!” incident in 2014 but now that I have I find the contrast striking. In just over sixty years the exclamation has evolved from something yelled out by a knife wielding hoodlum to an apology from someone in a marriage so sexless even putting his mouth on something making indirect contact with his own spouse’s beverage is intolerable.
Of course I could be wrong in seeing a contrast at all and not even “Japanese Scarface” would knowingly share a soda, let alone cocaine, straw. Maybe it’s not a sign of a sexless union at all and observing strict taboos around food and beverage serve to maintain a smoldering level of erotic tension. I used to message my one Japanese friend, the artist Tetsunori Tawaraya, with these kind of questions but for now I’m comfortable living with a bit of mystery.
The last time I’d reached out I wanted to know how the artist RammEllZee was referred to in Japan with what seemed like unpronounceable phonemes in his name but the answer, Ramery, wasn’t particularly satisfying. Maybe someone else from Japan will reach out to tell me that nobody in the entire island nation would drink from a cup after another mouth has touched the straw and explain the exact moment that “Oh my God!” became part of the common lexicon. Maybe I’ll just continue to wonder about both of these things.
I’m comfortable with either one of those outcomes.
By the time we’d finished eating whatever it was we’d ordered it was already getting close to dark so we decided to spend the night in Cambria instead of attempting to continue hitch hiking. We had a decent amount of luggage with us, LaPorsha never went anywhere without a huge rolling suitcase back then, and I remember a long walk across town to an overbooked youth hostel followed by an equally fruitless trudge out to the beach. Eventually it became clear that we’d have to rough it.
What we weren’t traveling with was a lot of bedding – we didn’t have a tent and had only brought a single blanket. To get us off the streets I found a stairwell leading to a rear antique shop but it was miserably cold. Ironically we were sleeping next to one of those standing gas heaters popular with outdoor dining in San Diego or Los Angeles but I had no idea what kind of fuel it used or how one might turn it on.
I borrowed a tarp that was draped over chairs at a cafe around the corner and this allowed us to accumulate enough shared body heat to sleep for a few hours. At the crack of dawn we trekked back to the highway and continued our trip down to San Luis Obispo. We might have got there on the following day or it could have taken us two of them. I think this ride was with a young woman who lived in a generic housing development and showed us pictures of little sculptures she made of Tim Burton characters on her phone.
The spot we were dropped off at was nowhere near The Madonna Inn so we had to figure out a couple of regional transit buses. Due to our method of travel it had been impossible to get prior reservations – a trip that I had expected to take one or two days was easily three times as long. It was a long walk from the entrance of the hotel complex to an actual reception desk and once we got there we discovered that there were no vacancies whatsoever and every room was usually booked out at least two weeks ahead of time.
I’ve still never stayed there or even set foot into the more picturesque sections.
At this point we were pretty exhausted and ready to throw in the towel. I wrote earlier that I thought there might be either a bus or train connecting San Luis Obispo with Los Angeles but now I remember there definitely was because whatever it was we found it and took it. Instead of The Madonna Inn we got a room in a random hotel on the west side of downtown Los Angeles near Figueroa for just over a hundred dollars.
It was kind of fancy, there were fresh flowers and trays of chocolate chip cookies, but it was also kind of trashy. I walked over to Spring Street and found us some morphine pills – we weren’t at a point where we were using opiates every day but considering we lived in Tijuana it was something we were getting into the habit of. At some point I found a huge cockroach in our room and I caught it in a bag and brought it down to reception.
They weren’t really implying that I had brought it in myself but they weren’t offering any kind of refund either. It was a hotel in downtown Los Angeles for just over one hundred dollars and we were the kind of people who walked to Spring Street for pills and lived in Tijuana. What I’m getting at is that we fit the profile of their target clientele and they weren’t particularly concerned with us leaving a bad review. I doubt we even bothered with it.
The next morning we went downstairs for what’s commonly called a “continental breakfast” – presumably to reassure people it won’t be English food. There were fresh trays of the cookies and waffle irons set up with pre-measured cups of batter and the “fresh squeezed” juice machines that still seem to be there in far cheaper, trashier hotels. I’m not talking about any kind of machine where you see the actual fruit – I mean the plastic tap machines that I imagine are loaded with large space bags of juice from concentrate.
This marked the end of our “honeymoon” and we returned to our apartment in Tijuana. Our actual wedding night had been pretty miserable because Barkev, who was acting as officiant, was so focused on getting laid that he lost our tent and instead of camping on the beach with everybody we caught a ride with him and the girl back to town. She was incredibly drunk and we got pulled over and had to bribe police – two or three times.
Our “honeymoon” wasn’t much better but at least it seems to make for a better story. In a few more months we’d go trimming and buy our car but we’d already had so many negative experiences with Mexican authorities that we never even drove it over the border. I’ve written about police harassment being the reason we decided to leave but in retrospect it could have just been the car.
Every time we went “home” it either hadn’t helped with the journey at all or was left in a parking lot on the U.S. side where we’d have to pay ten dollars a day. Either option felt stupid – long journeys on buses and trolleys didn’t feel like freedom but neither did being on an expensive timer to have a car in walking distance the next time we walked across.
Different people might have driven across and dealt with living in Tijuana with an American car – we definitely saw license plates while walking around that showed that wouldn’t have been impossible. That wasn’t us. We left.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 