Just Sauce

During my Canon internship, I was assigned to the Internal Communications Division, whose role was to disseminate news about Canon internally. We published a company magazine, as well as a monthly video program called "Video News." My task during the summer was to make an English version of the most recent Video News program into English, so that it could be disseminated for the first time to the overseas subsidiaries.

The Internal Communications Division shared a large room overlooking the Kanto Plain with a couple of other divisions. We had a pod of seven desks, with our division-head, Tamano-san, at its head. Tamano-san was a roundish, bespectacled, good-natured man in his early 40s with salt and pepper hair, who spoke pretty good English. Our other division members included Kakurai-san, Matsuura-san and Nakajima-san. Nakajima-san was a cameraman and video operator, so I worked with him most closely. Since he did not speak much English, it was a good chance for me to work on my Japanese. I did not get to practice much Japanese with Matsuura-san, who had lived in the United States as a child, but I did spent most of my summer trying to summon the courage to ask her out, which I never did. Kakurai-san, I later learned, had a reputation for hanging out at some of Tokyo's stranger sex clubs, though he seemed like a normal enough guy to me.

At the base of our pod of desks, at the other end from Tamano-san, were several cardboard boxes containing plastic bottles of brown liquid. No one ever took any of the bottles out; they just sat there all summer. All summer long, I wondered what they were. Finally, one day, I asked Tamano-san, what was in the bottles.

"Sauce," he said.

"What kind of sauce?," I asked.

"Just sauce," he responded.

"But what kind of sauce is it?," I persisted, thinking that maybe he had not understood me.

"It's not a kind of sauce," a bit flustered why I did not understand. "It's 'sauce'."

I gave up.

"Sauce," I later learned, is what Japanese use to refer to the brown demi-glace sauce used for tonkatsu (fried pork cutlet) and other fried, breaded foods (but not tempura). Apparently, when it was introduced into Japan, where no sauces previously existed, demi-glace sauce became "sauce." And, because "sauce" was an English word, Tamano-san expected me to understand what it was.

After a very brief period of trying to come up with Japanese words for foreign concepts in the 19th century, they apparently gave up and began adopting foreign words to describe the new things they represented. Over time, Japanese appears to have lost its ability to generate new words, and now most new words seem to be foreign words or "Japanese" words made up of foreign words. Often, the new words are contractions or hybrids, but because they are based (mostly) on English, Japanese often think of them as English words and are surprised when Americans don't understand them.

Some examples are:
remocon -- remote control
arafo -- around forty (years old)
arafi -- around fifty
waapuro -- word processor
depaato -- department store
neeto -- (a person) Not in Employment Education or Training

Even in New York, the local Japanese community makes up contractions for local places, where the whole English name is just too tiring to say. My favorite of these is:

Gurasen -- Grand Central Station