Berkeley Diary

Masaki YAMAOKA



Apr/25/2005  My Finds to Word Lag(1) Jet Lag VS. Jisa Boke

    In my American life, I found interesting differences between English and Japanese vocabulary. I am going to write it in my diary.

   
On this globe time differs depending on where one is. Everyone finds the existence of this difference in two ways. The one is when they make an overseas telephone call. The other is when they move by airplane over a long distance.

    When I arrived in San Francisco International Airport, it was around 10 am. At the same time, in Japan it was around 2 am the next day. I suffered from the difference in time for a week afterward. We call this suffering "jisa boke" in Japanese. "Boke" derives from a verb "boke-ru". It is difficult to expalain the meaning in English. Anyway the verb has a negative meaning. For example, an idiom "boke roujin" means "senile dementia". For Japanese people, the difference in time equals suffering.

    But in English, the phenomenon is called by the name "jet lag". Japanese people name this phenomenon by the suffering as its effect. English speeking people name it the jet airplane as its cause. Maybe they don't feel suffering as Japanese do. Especially USA is a vast land. There is three hours difference in time between the West Coast and the East Coast. Major League Baseball players frequently work in "jet lag". But people of an island country like Japan including me don't become familiar with it easily.




To: Soka University HP (English)
To: Department of the Japanese Language and Literature HP
To: Masaki YAMAOKA's HP: Index