What Does the Japanese on Our Shirts Say? (And Is It Okay to Wear?)

What does the Japanese on InkForm shirts say? Every design with Japanese text has its translation on the product page, and all of them are collected in the table below. Most of it is the name of the thing in the picture: 鬼 means oni, 龍 means dragon, 河豚 means pufferfish. A few designs carry a short phrase, like 知らん, casual Japanese for "no idea" or "not my business."

We put the translations in writing because a shirt with Japanese on it should come with an answer to "what does that say?" You will get asked. Probably by a stranger, probably in line for coffee.

The classic kanji shirt problem

Wrong or meaningless Japanese on shirts and tattoos has been a running joke for decades. It usually happens in one of a few ways:

• Characters picked one at a time. Someone takes a list of "kanji meanings," picks a character for each English word, and lines them up. Japanese doesn't build sentences that way, so the result reads as a pile of unrelated words.
• Machine translation. An English phrase goes into a translator and comes out as something stiff, overly literal, or plain wrong, with no Japanese speaker ever checking it.
• Chinese and Japanese mixed up. Kanji came from Chinese characters, and many look identical. Some carry different meanings or usage in each language, so a character that works in one can read oddly in the other.
• Layout mistakes. Characters printed mirrored, upside down, or in the wrong order, often by a designer who couldn't read them.
• Broken text. A font that can't display Japanese turns the characters into garbled symbols, and the garble gets printed anyway.

You can still wear Japanese text. Just make sure someone can tell you exactly what it says.

How to check what a Japanese shirt says

You don't need to read Japanese to avoid most of the problems above.

1. Ask the seller for the characters and the translation in writing. A brand that knows what its shirt says will tell you. A brand that answers "it means strength and honor" with no characters attached is a brand that probably doesn't know.
2. Paste the characters into a Japanese-English dictionary. Jisho.org is a free one. If the product page only shows a picture of the text, that's already a small warning sign.
3. Try a camera translation app as a first check. It works on clean printed text. It struggles with brush lettering and stylized fonts, so a weird result doesn't always mean the shirt is wrong.
4. Be careful with single-kanji "meanings." One kanji can have several readings and meanings depending on the word it sits in. A one-word gloss is a starting point, not the full story.
5. Ask someone who reads Japanese. Still the most reliable check.

The Japanese on every InkForm design, translated

The characters and meanings below come from each product's own description. Where a description shows the characters without a separate meaning, we've listed what they name (for example 天狗 on the Tengu tee is the word "tengu"). Japanese uses three scripts, and you'll see all three here: kanji (Chinese-derived characters), hiragana (rounded, used for native words) and katakana (angular, often used for loanwords and emphasis).

A few notes on the table:

• The two kaerus. 蛙 (frog) and 帰る (to return home) are both pronounced kaeru. The frog on our Kaeru tee carries 帰る, which is the whole point of the design: frog charms are kept so that what leaves comes back.
• 雷 has more than one reading. On its own it's usually read kaminari. Inside compound words it's often read rai, as in Raijin.
• The ninja one does two jobs. 忍 is the first character of shinobi and ninja. Its core meaning is to endure. Our description leans on the sneaking-away sense, which is the reason the shirt exists.
• No hidden messages. The English line on each shirt (DEMON OF MONDAYS, TALK TO THE PAW and so on) is our joke. The Japanese only names or labels the picture. It doesn't secretly say anything else.

Is it okay to wear Japanese text or folklore if you're not Japanese?

It's a fair question, and there isn't one official answer. Nobody speaks for everyone in Japan, including us, a graphic tee brand that prints in the US. People in Japan hold different views on this, the way people anywhere do. What we can give you is how we think about it.

Know what it says. Wearing a word you can't explain is how people end up with the shirts in the section above. If you can answer "what does that mean?" in one sentence, you're already ahead of most kanji shirts out there.

Ask who the joke is on. Appreciation and mockery look different. Fake "Asian" fonts, put-on accents and jokes about Japanese people are mockery. A tired oni drinking green tea is a joke about Mondays. The punchline on our shirts is always the creature or the situation, never Japanese people or the language.

Remember where these characters already live. Oni, kappa, tengu, tanuki and lucky cats are not obscure sacred secrets. They're folklore and art that Japan's own pop culture uses constantly. Kappa appear on river safety signs and as town mascots. Ceramic tanuki stand outside restaurants. Maneki-neko sit in shop windows. Yokai fill anime, manga and games. Hokusai's Great Wave is one of the best-known Japanese artworks in the world. Wearing these is joining a very long line of people who think they're great.

Take more care with religious objects. Folklore creatures and everyday words are one thing. Sacred items and active religious symbols ask for more thought, and that's a reasonable line to hold.

Wear it like you mean it. If you like the art, know the story and can explain the text, you're wearing it for the right reasons. Opinions will still vary, and that's fine.

Wear it: three designs that are easy to explain

If you want a shirt you can explain in one breath:

• Already Left Ninja T-Shirt: one character, 忍, and an English line that explains itself. You'll be gone before anyone asks.
• Demon of Mondays Oni T-Shirt: 鬼 means oni. The oni is having tea. That's the entire lore.
• Cat Ramen Back T-Shirt: three bits of Japanese, all on a ramen stall sign, all fully translated above. The cat still won't take special requests.

All printed to order in the US, in black, pepper, ivory or white, sizes S to 3XL.