Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

"Engrish" is the term used to describe the hilariously mangled English the Japanese adorn damn near everything with, especially shirts, but also pants, signs, calendars, pencils, food, etc. If a surface can have near-illiterate English stamped on it, chances are it will.

This is because English is cool. The Japanese don't particularly care to understand what's written, which is good since it usually makes absolutely no sense. Sometimes, though, Engrish can reach sublime and even, apparently, unintentionally literary levels of absurdity.

Today, one girl at the university cafeteria was wearing a green pullover that bore the words, in white, rounded 70's-style letters: "Milk of Human Kindness."

That's right, this Japanese girl in this boring city on an island at the dizzy fringes of Asia was wearing a shirt with an allusion to "Macbeth" on it. Which means that Engrish has gotten so bad as to have come full circle and become ... Shakespeare. Somewhere, a monkey hunched over a typewriter is smiling.

The back of the shirt advertised a company called "Personal." I didn't get a chance to read their full motto, though I did see that they described it as "a gratuitous company." No kidding.

The other girl's shirt wasn't directly Shakespearean, though it contained a sentiment Lady Macbeth doubtless would have appreciated. On the front in large, colorful, sparkly letters it said, "The Secret to MAINTAINING One's Health..." At first, I thought this would be your standard, inocuous, Celine Dion ballad-esque Engrish shirt (like "If I could one hope: dream grew love")... then I saw the sleeve, where said secret was spelled out in big, block letters. It read, I kid you not: "Physical Violence."

Yes, according to my (again, female elementary school) student's shirt, the secret to maintaining one's health is... physical violence. If there were an Engrish shirt to express my reaction to seeing that, it would read:

"A Brick in My Pants, Please, Let's Shitting."