All of America Wept

Dirk Schwieger, a German living in Tokyo, did an interesting comic blog over at LiveJournal. He took “assignments” from folks on the Internet (like eat some fugu) and then created a comic about the experience. He did 24 assignments, ranging from staying at a love hotel to commenting on the role of gender in Japanese society.

While going through his archives, I found one interesting linguistic tidbit. Young Japanese have started using the phrase “zenbei ga naita”, which translates as “all of america cried”, to mean something unimportant or uninteresting. I was hoping for some sort of schadenfreude-y explanation of the phrase’s origins, but apparently Hollywood is to blame for this one.

According to a Mainichi story, now sadly gone from the web but paraphrased here:

The phrase 全米が泣いた (zenbei ga naita), literally “it brought the whole of America to tears”, is an empty bit of salestalk used liberally in movie advertising in Japan; the kids, having been promised weepiness and then left the theatre dry-eyed too many times, are now using it to mean “something of no importance”.