The Gaijin Kaijin issue
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Right from the beginning I new that the word “gaijin” is considered racial and should not be used (you can here it though usually when some oji- or obasan tells his/her grandchild who we are). It was strange for me why a word which literally means foreign person (kai – outside/foreign and jin – person) should be racial and you should instead use gaikokojin (literally foreignland(koko)person). Well, may be gaijin translates a little bit like outsider but what the hack, these people must be really very polite.
Recently though I found another word which resembles quite a bit the gaijin one but with quite not so innocent meaning – kaijin (monster). It is compoused of the of the kanji ? (kai) (mistery, wonder) and the second one is again jin (? – person). I did some additional search with google and I found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiju in which kaijin is explained as humanoid monster. Well this start to make finally some sense gaijin/kaijin. I remember a friend of mine tall, western woman with beautiful blue ice when traveling in the train to here the kids sitting next to her saying kowai (yes, it is similar to kawai but with exactly the opposite meaning, it means scary or creepy). Sad but true, often we are just a scary monsters here (especially for the small kids), big, strange, scary. I asked a Japanese friend about my gaijin/kaijin theory and he promptly denied that there is anything in common between these two words but somehow he couldnt quite get it that I am asking him if gaijin is forbidden because kaijin (such misunderstanding are happening often and I am not sure at all if this is just a language issue). Anyway theory or not this are my two cents for the Gaijin/Kaijin issue. May be one day a Japanese person will see this blog entry and will dare to comment on it :)
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