Akemi’s Anime Blog AAW Blog

• Author: Akemi
• Date: October 29, 2010 - 1:35am
• Filed Under: Random Stuff • What's Happenin' In Japan

This is one of those times when otaku do something that’s somewhere between impressive and tragically oblivious.

Apparently, as the Internet tells it, there is a racial slur in China targeted at things Japanese written using the following characters: 日本鬼子; it roughly means “Japanese devil.” These characters also exist in Japanese, but don’t come across as meaning quite the same thing; in particular, the character 鬼 is oni, the traditional Japanese ogres we all know and love from Urusei Yatsura and any number of other anime incarnations.

Now, it also happens that in Japanese that looks a bit like a name: Hinomoto Oniko. Which, once you think of it that way, is a pretty badass-sounding name; were it a real name, it would mean something like “Japanese Child of the Oni.” And then you give that to otaku, and you get this:

This is just one of dozens (#46, specifically) at the below-linked site; it doesn't give an artist credit.

The page from which this illustration came makes an attempt at aggregating well over a hundred moe-fueled examples—some quite skillful—of interpretations of the person that the name would fit.  #9 is particularly cool, and even includes a subtle tiger-print UY nod.

It’s not entirely clear whether this is a clever subversion of an insult or a comically tragic example of the contextual ignorance that happens when you throw otaku at pretty much anything—rule 34 and the laws of moe work their magic on it.

Either way, it’s pretty funny, and there is some nifty art in the gallery.

[Linguistic footnote: Hinomoto Oniko is the Japanese order; her family name would be the fictional Hinomoto (written with the same characters as "Japan"), and her given name would be the unsurprisingly-fictional "Oniko" ("child of the oni"). The name would also be female, since it ends with the character "ko."]