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When I first started watching anime and other Japanese materials, the language itself was completely lost on me and I relied mostly on translations and subtitles, as most other fans do. Ever since I’ve started learning Japanese, however, I’ve found it really satisfying to be able to get a better understanding of what characters are actually saying. There’s a completely different kind of cadence and flow to Japanese speech which, many times, can give a different impression than the English translation. Of course, this is natural for any language. But as I said, it really becomes satisfying to be able to not only just read a translation, but also connect it to what you are hearing in Japanese and understand the connection between the two.

Of course, at this point, all I’m really doing is just going through each part of a sentence and understanding how it all connects to form the meaning of the title, but somehow, I find that very fun to do.

Anyways, these two titles came up during my web browsing the other day and I thought I’d write a short post about their titles. The first is “Mimi o Sumaseba”, a very lovely Ghibli film. The English title is “Whisper of the Heart”, which is more or less a retitling rather than a translation. I’ve always read that the literal translation of the title (in Japanese, “耳をすませば”) was “If you listen closely”, which is a very charming title in my opinion. But I notice that it isn’t an actual literal translation. The first word, “耳” (Mimi), means “ear”. “を”, written “wo” but pronounced “o” is a particle which connects the noun to the following verb. That verb is “すませば”(Sumaseba), which I believe is the conditional form (meaning “if”) of the verb which can mean “to clear”. So essentially the literal translation of “Mimi o Sumaseba” would be “If you clear your ears”.

That might sound a bit strange when written in English, and you can certainly see how “If you listen closely” can be derived (in meaning) from that phrase. Also, it might simply be the case that the phrase “mimi o sumaseba”, in everyday Japanese, simply has the same meaning as “If you listen closely” does in English. That explanation seems very likely. All the same, having a more literal grasp of what the Japanese actually means is something I find fairly rewarding, even if it is still a very rudimentary grasp.

Next is “Maison Ikkoku” （めぞん一刻）. “めぞん” (Maison, or more accurately, “mezon” in Japanese katakana) is just a foreign loanword from French (the meaning should be obvious). The more interesting part is “一刻” (Ikkoku). When I first started watching the series, I didn’t pay much attention to what this meant. The first character “一” is “one”, and the second, “刻” is “koku”, which is a word that has a connotation of a certain moment or time. Combined it would mean something like, “one moment” or “an instant”. So “Ikkoku-kan” would be translated as something like, “House of one moment” which isn’t quite as succinct as the Japanese phrase. But I think that there is something very fitting about that name, don’t you?

While we’re on this topic, though, I should bring up something else I noticed, which is the name of the final episode, which was “一刻館は永遠に….”. In their subtitles, Tenchi Domain translated this as “Maison Ikkoku is forever…” which I thought sounded strange. The first part of the sentence, “一刻館”, is “Ikkoku-kan”, obviously referring to the home of the characters. Next is the particle “wa” which would mean “is”, so the translation is literally correct so far. “永遠” (“eien”, which does indeed mean “forever” or “eternally”) but is followed by the particle “ni”. If you replaced the words in this phrase with others you can sort of get the meaning. Eg, “Watashi wa doyoubi ni [some verb]” would literally mean, “I, on Saturday, did [some verb]“. So I guess literally this title could be written as “Maison Ikkoku, for eternity, is…..” (or replace “for eternity” with forever). Which doesn’t exactly sound cinematic, but I think it’s slightly less awkward than “Maison Ikkoku is forever..”.

There’s always that chance, of course, that in regular Japanese context this phrase has a well-understood meaning that isn’t literally obvious and I’m wrong about everything. The pitfalls of being a beginner, I suppose .

This may all seem like a fruitless exercise considering I haven’t really done anything other than go through and analyze each word. Is it strange that I derive some kind of pleasure from doing that? For my sake, let’s just say no ^_^;

Tags: Maison Ikkoku