I’m a teacher, and one of my students came in wearing a belt with Japanese characters on it. They look like this: ら井モ臣ら廾
I can spot the Hiragana “Ra” and Katakana “Mo” no problem, but the other characters are all radicals, so I have no idea which reading of them you’d use to get a proper noun. The third of them: 臣 has a Kanji reading “Omi” related to some hereditary title. From what I can tell, the possible combinations would be:
Ra - i/sei/shou - mo - shin/jin/omi - ra - nijyuu/kyou/ku.
Does anybody have any thoughts about what this random text printed on a belt might come from? The student knows that I’m into Japanese and asked me if I could make sense of it, and I’m totally at a loss.
Looks like nonsense to me if you actually try to interprete it as Japanese.
I figured it might be an English word written in Japanese characters for stylization purposes or whatever - the closest word I could think of was ‘sheesh’. Honestly thought that was a bit of a stretch but I googled it and actually got a result. Is it that belt by any chance?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from too much time on Reddit, it’s that there’s no limit to how awful the fake Japanese on clothing can get. I’ve come across far worse on there (and I have actually seen someone post about this exact belt before).
Slight tangent, but I met someone once who had a tattoo of 弦 on their arm. I asked what it was supposed to mean and apparently they had requested a tattoo of the Japanese word for “guitar”. Granted, it’s not a terrible choice for that request, and it certainly looks better than a tattoo saying ギター. I just found it funny that they thought it literally meant “guitar”.
(Just wanted to say that while this one isn’t that bad, incorrect Japanese can be on worse places than clothing. )
Is it that belt by any chance?
