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.