Since anime and Japanese pop culture have gone mainstream, a lot of Japanese slang has been adopted and reinterpreted by Western audiences. These terms, when adopted by Western Japan fans, often become very disconnected from their common usage in Japanese.
Today I want to explore how a few of these terms actually translate in normal Japanese conversation!
Chuuni 中二病
Chuuni was popularized in the West by the anime Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai. So a lot of Western fans associate it with anime…it isn’t really an anime term, though. The slang predates the show by nearly two decades and has been common in Japanese netizen lingo since then. It literally means “8th grader’s disease.” It’s something of a mix between cringe, sophomoric, and edgelord. I get that Western anime fans will call things “chuuni” now but the way they use it isn’t really aligned with how it’s actually used in Japan.
To give an example of how this is used in Japanese: I have a Japanese friend who is well-educated on philosophy, literature and various spiritual systems. We were speaking (in Japanese) a while back about Hinduism and he remarked that he thought Hindu cosmology was “chuuni” (and that it was cool because of it!).
Japanese literary critic, Boshi Chino, referred to the famous Spanish novel Don Quixote as Chuuni.
I’d argue that people who wear fedoras are chuuni. I was pretty chuuni when I put roots on an ex-boyfriend. Woody Allen and Kendrick Lamar are kinda chuuni. Yukio Mishima and Osamu Dazai are both a lil chuuni. LiveJournal is pretty chuuni, and so are those Substack West Village girl sex newsletters. But I’d even argue that those occasionally veer into menhera territory.
So how shall we translate Chuuni? Sophmoric works in a literal sense. While edgelord feels fitting it also feels a bit too casual…? A Japanese book refers chuuni as having a few types: to who act like delinquents; “subculture”, who go against the mainstream trends; and “evil eye”, who aspire to have special powers….
The context for this is incredibly Japanese as well. Because in America, although we ostracize outliers we have a cultural expectation that people will have some sense of delusions of grandeur. Maybe some words can’t be translated?
Menhera メンヘラ
Menhera is a term that has been widely abused by Western fashion fans. It’s literally a portmanteau of “mental health.” I don’t think its adoption constitutes cultural appropriation, since terms naturally gain new meanings when they’re borrowed into new languages. But the most common use of menhera in America is tied to a fashion style that got popular in the mid-2010s, featuring imagery of girls with slit wrists, dyed hair, and needles.
Like Chuuni, this term is used differently in Japan than it is by Western Japan fans.
While that specific fashion aesthetic exists in Japan, menhera is more commonly used as a colloquial term to disparage young women. There’s no single English equivalent, but our casual use of “BPD” gets pretty close.
Things Japanese people often call menhera:
Girls who wear Lolita fashion
Girls who work at maid cafes or concept cafes
Girls who wear Jirai Kei fashion
Girls who go to host clubs
Women with mental health issues that are publicly visible
Possessive or clingy girlfriends
It’s not a specific niche fashion subculture the way it’s been framed in the West. It’s more of a behavioral descriptor that expresses itself through certain aesthetics like Jirai Kei, but the usage is really about the person’s behavior, not the clothes.
This is probably the hardest to translate and it’s also not widely known to Westerners.
Chigyu, short for Cheese Gyudon (チーズ牛丼), is a pejorative for nerdy dimwitted guys who often order...cheese gyudon. The closest American equivalent is maybe... neckbeard? incel? Chud? Incel and chud imply some political association which this term doesn’t really have. But a neckbeard conjures up the thought of a rotund man in his 40s. Whereas a chigyu also isn’t that.
It’s making fun of someone’s intelligence, social grace(or lack thereof), appearance, hobbies and fast food preferences lol.
I hear Japanese people use this more like people would’ve said the term otaku 20 years ago.
Bonus term: Netto Uyoku!
This isn’t a new term, but it refers to Japanese nationalists on the internet. These are the people who spawn in your mentions on X if you’re foolish enough to bring up the atrocities of Nanking. They can also usually be found in the replies of crime reporting, insisting that the criminal must secretly be ethnically Korean. They typically have an image of a cat, a cute girl, or an anime character as their profile photo.