The Ancient Art of Japanese

As I sat here on this bed and the hotel phone rang, and it was my ex-wife's mother telling me that my eight-year-old son's teacher was personally upset that I was taking him out of school four days early, well, I got creative (What the fuck else do you do in Japan.)

I thought of how many ways in Japanese that I could reprimand this fine fellow, in language he would actually understand.

But the thing is, insulting someone in Japanese is actually a very fine and practiced art. You can't just say, as we in the West are inclined to do, "Fuck you and the fucking horse you rode in on."

See, that makes sense to US but a Japanese would just observe you quizzically, as if you were a freshly-minted transplant from a dwarf planet. No, you can't bandy about cuss words 'n' such and there is regrettably, no equivalent in Japanese for "fuck", so you have to be creative.

I won't give you a Japanese lesson. It would bore you to tears. But basically, the best way for you to tell a Japanese person in their own language to take a hike is NOT, as you might suspect, saying "You fucking fuck, piece-of-shit asshole, if you don't get out of my fucking face, like, yesterday already, I'll fucking plaster your atoms so far all over the galaxy that every one of them will be HILARIOUS to see your prime asshole recede into the sunset", but rather, "My good man, if you could see your way clear to making your honorable exit from my humble and respectful presence, it would do very much to make my day much better than it has been so far."

Tell THAT to the fucking Rosetta Stone people.