Pocari Sweat

“And what is “sweat” in Japanese?”

There is the kind of silence you only hear upon asking a class of Japanese students to volunteer information. It is a thick, oppressive silence and it lingers with ferocity. My coworker decides that this single sentence is quite enough English for the day, and switches back to Japanese.

“Sweat, sweat, so how do you say sweat?”
There is another extended silence and I fight the urge to say something, anything, to fill it.
“Ase, ne. Ase is sweat in Japanese,” and there is a five second pause while the students digest this new information.
“What” one of them exclaims, “You mean Pocari Sweat actually means the sweat of a Pocari?”
“What’s a Pocari?” another chimes in.
“That’s disgusting. Why would you call any drink something’s sweat?” and the class explodes into chatter as they discuss how retarded this all is. What kind of an idiot would. Who in their right mind would. Why the hell would…

“Often, when foreigners first come to Japan, they are surprised by this drink” I say, “the name is very strange. Why would you want to drink sweat?”

Suddenly my JTE gets a gleam in his eye. I have seen this gleam only twice: the first was when I suggested feeding the students Vegemite (subsequent to that class, he had a specific vocab lesson where he taught them the words “torture” and “torturer”) and the second time whilst extolling the virtues of a Japanese diet (“I, ano ne, I think Japanese diet much better than Western, ne. Eat a lot of healthina foods. Do you know natto? Very good for you, I think. Let’s asking students which Western foods is bad for health.”) Oh fuck, I thought, here we go.

“Do you know Calpis” he says to the class and they stop their show of mock gagging about the idea of drinking sweat, and listen. “If you say Calpis in English, it sounds like “Cow Piss” which means the urine of a cow. So if you ask a foreigner if they want a drink of Calpis, maybe they will think…” There is a stunned silence which stretches slowly into an uncomfortable one. One of the students at the back finally looks up from her ketai.

“I’m never drinking Pocari Sweat or Calpis again. Never.”

Posted in Schooled on Tuesday June 6, 2006.