hold that tiger.
 

hey, i just got hold that tiger today and i'm wondering what the japanese writing on the cover says. i'm teaching myself japanese, and from what i can read it is pronounced something like "poku no hahaha kahimono niyuki mashita." (i may have some of the the spacing wrong.) what confuses me is that it's written in katakana, which i thought were reserved for imported words, and if my transliteration is correct that definitely sounds like native japanese vocabulary. any japanese speakers here who can clear that up?

fuck i used to take japanese, but now all i can say are "how much are those black shoes" , and "the post office is over there"

I know a tiny bit, but more importantly I know how to use my Kanji dictionary quite well. I'll look it up though cause I don't have the CD.

Edit: If anyone could get a bigger picture of it, I could get it. The sentence structure looks basic, and it looks like there's furigana next to the kanji anyway.

Boku no haha ni kaimono ikimashita.

My mother went shopping?

furigana -- so that's what they're called. i can't read kanji so i was using those for reference.

here's the biggest one i could find on google. maybe you could save it and blow it up?

Ya I can't read kanji either. Maybe 30 or so of them, but there are a good 2000+ that you have to learn to be considered fluent. Can you read and transcribe the furigana, though? They're way too small to see. I could get it that way for sure. I'm almost positive it says "My mother went shopping" though.

My sources concur with acousticrock87.

its writen in ancient opaic japaneese, from the ancinet rammadh monks who used to actually breed tigers and train them for the first few years of their lives... this section of text comes from the general "slopping out" procedure where the tiger would have a big shit and one monk would communicate the one sentence in two seperate languages... so the first half is

"Hold that Tiger......."
and its japaneese second half actually translates as "while i wipe its arse"

Nice one!

That's hilarious. SY is the only band that would have that on a cover. I really want to buy it.

i was joking. i havent a clue what it means.

Somebody told me it means, Your mother has gone shopping.

Also, supposedly, the cover photo is not of Thurston and Kim, as one might suppose at a quick glance but of members of Pussy Galore. (?) Has anybody heard anything about that? When somebody told me that, I took a closer look, and it really doesn't look like Thurston and Kim. But I'm not real sure what the people in Pussy Galore look like.

Shit I really thought it was true becuz My mother went shopping didn't seem right. Haha I actually believed you. I thought, "Where the hell would he learn this?" Fooled me................

My guess is that its Bob Bert and Julie Cafritz... i'm actually pretty sure of that.

here's a larger pic if you guys need it...

Okay. Pussy Galore drummer and guitarist, respectively.

Bob did a lot of things on the early SY albums, too, didn't he?

I can see the resemblance to Thurston, with the hair, but that doesn't look anything like Kim. Bob Bert played the drums on CiS and BMR, though.

"Boku (I, masculine) no ('s) haha (mom) wa (subject marker for mom) kaimono (shopping) ni (at) yukimashita (go, past tense)." So "My mom went at shopping." I'm assuming they just always use "at" with that word. I don't know.

definitely bob and julie.

ok, as long as we're on the japanese topic here's another question. what does the japanese sy avatar say? i got it down to "hisuteriwwa komiwwasu" but either a) the english got so whacked when it was given a japanese pronunciation as to be totally unrecognizable, b) it's native japanese (which would be odd since, again, it's written in katakana), and/or c) i fucked up the transliteration (those "wa"s might be "fu"s, and the "w"s might be "tsu"s or even "shi"s, though i think i have those right since they look like the small, double-letter-making "tsu"s). any guesses?

It's definitely English. Hisuterikku Komikkusu. Only thing you did was translate the ku's as wa's. Katakana is actually very hard to read at first because they all look similar. I can read them, but I have a hard time recalling them all like I can with hiragana.

The u's are almost always silent in foreign words like that - and even in normal Japanese, for that matter. So it would be pronounced something like Histerik Komiks, and Hysteric Comics is all I can think of it meaning. Has to be. But I don't know what that is.