[wikipedia] – [imdb]

On DVD at home with Lucía on 25 June 2008 around 23:00.

Juzo Itami likes to make movies about self-improvement. About learning how to do something right, and about staying on the straight and narrow despite what obstacles you might find thrown at you. While much more focused than Tampopo, Supermarket Woman felt like a bit of an unwelcome refinement of his form. This not to say that I disliked the film, it’s just that where Tampopo was rough, experimental, meandering, and even educational, Supermarket Woman felt slick, formulaic, underdeveloped, and didactic. We never really came to know any of the main characters, or even really to get a good feel for them. All the background characters were mere caricatures and even the main characters were just more sophisticated caricatures.

The main story of Tampopo is not itself terribly interesting. What is interesting are the little side plots the characters get into, and even more so the little mini-stories that pull the film in this way and that. In fact, the ending of Tampopo makes me quite sad every time, because I know that the film is over and there are no more little stories to tell. Despite all of this, the entire film manages to be quite focused on a single theme: food. Aside from a short fist fight (and probably the best I’ve seen on film) and a redecorating job, the film never departs from the topic of food-making and food-eating. Supermarket Woman really suffers from being so similar to Tampopo that comparison is completely unavoidable. While a fine film in its own right (it is funny, Nobuko Miyamoto is as magnetic in her middle age as she ever was, the lessons are interesting and possibly even useful, and the dissection of the business of supermarkets is itself fascinating), it is inferior in every way to Tampopo.

One consequence of all of these borrowed words is a preponderance of synonyms (and, because of the fairly limited phoneme set of Japanese, a preponderance of homonyms as well), particularly in pairs. Generally speaking, given a synonym pair of one on’yomi word and one kun’yomi word, the on’yomi word is seen as more formal or katai (固い, or hard) and is primarily used in writing, news reports, and official communications (e.g., a bank teller serving a customer or an announcer at a train station). Along with various other factors, this means that learning written or formal Japanese is in many ways like learning a different language from informal spoken Japanese.

Also like most languages, old Japanese often had multiple distinct semantic values for one lexeme, so many lexemes from old Japanese ended up having several Chinese characters assigned to each of them. This means that in modern Japanese often several words with similar pronunciation but completely different kanji are etymologically connected. Long before I found out about any of this, I remember noticing an apparent connection in pronunciation and meaning for certain words despite the different kanji. In particular I remember 始める (hajimeru, to begin) and 初めて (hajimete, for the first time). There was also the strangely coincidental pronunciation of 湖 (mizuumi, lake) which seemed a lot like the concatenation of 水 (mizu, water) and 海 (umi, ocean), although my teacher at the time insisted that it was nothing more than a coincidence.

I first learned about the phenomenon a few years back, and have since been noticing likely etymological connections, particularly the obvious ones where there are several words with the same pronunciation and the same basic meaning (e.g., 合う, 会う, 逢う; 切る, 斬る; 診る, 見る, 観る). Unfortunately I’ve never seen a Japanese->English dictionary that includes notes about etymology, so they’ve primarily just been suspicions. The other day, however, I discovered that the Japanese->Japanese dictionary in my denshi jisho (電子辞書, electronic dictionary) has etymological notes for a lot of these connections, and it has enabled me to go exploring through all of my past suspicions about these odd little “coincidences” in Japanese word pronunciations. One interesting pair I’ve been able to confirm is 捨てる (suteru, to throw away) and 廃る (sutaru, to collapse, go to ruin). I was also glad to see that 雷 (kaminari, thunder) comes from 神鳴り (kami and nari, i.e., God crying out), even though the character 雷 itself has nothing to do with God and is composed of the character parts for rain and a rice field (it is probably the Chinese word for thunder, and the pronunciation is probably quite different).