Political Memes

would pose a problem for Japanese interpreters came last year after a leaked 2005 recording in which he made lewd remarks about women, describing how he grabs women “by the pussy”.

“We all had a huge problem with that,” said Tsuruta, who is also a professor of interpreting and translation studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. “If we had used [the Japanese loan word] pushii then a lot of people would not have understood what we were talking about.”

In the end, she played safe with the regular Japanese words for female genitalia. “It still made us all feel very uncomfortable.”

I remember them talking about this. One translator was even quoted as saying Japanese doesn't have a slang word for pussy, which was just wrong. It's perhaps a bit more vulgar than they'd want to print in a newspaper but it's not quite as strong as cunt, or the was the US uses it anyway--maybe it's comparable to printing that in an Australian newspaper.