Yani, Zeni, Gaki: Rough Japanese Words Subtitles Flatten

The English title is Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You. Perfectly accurate, and it loses the best word in the original.

The Japanese title is Sūpā no Ura de Yani Suu Futari — literally "the two who smoke yani behind the supermarket". And yani isn't the word for tobacco. The normal word is tabako. Yani means tar.

Calling a cigarette "tar" is the difference between "having a cigarette" and "going out for a smoke" — said by someone who knows exactly what it's doing to him.

That's precisely the right word for Sasaki, the worn-out salaryman at the centre of the show, whose day is held together by cigarettes and the smile of a supermarket clerk. It's rough, a little self-mocking, and nobody would put it on a job application. Subtitles can't carry that, so they don't try.

Japanese is full of words like this. Not criminal slang, not secret code — just the rough, everyday register people slip into with friends. Here's a list, with what each one actually sounds like.

Tobacco

**ヤニ yani — "tar"** Originally tree resin — matsuyani is pine resin — and by extension the tar in tobacco smoke. The brown stains on a smoker's teeth are yani too. As a word for cigarettes it's casual, blunt and faintly self-deprecating. Related: yani-gire ("out of tar"), the itchy irritability of a smoker who needs one now. "Chotto yani sutte kuru." — "Just going out for a smoke."

**一服 ippuku — "one dose"** The polite, almost gentle one. Ippuku was originally a single dose of medicine or a single bowl of tea, and it still means a short break in general. Saying ippuku rather than naming the cigarette makes smoking sound like a breather rather than a habit. "Ippuku shiyō ka." — "Shall we take a break?"

**モク *moku*** Older slang for a cigarette. It sounds dated now — the kind of word you'd hear from someone's grandfather, or from a character written to seem like one.

**シケモク shikemoku — a relit butt** A cigarette end picked up and smoked again. Shike comes from shikeru — to go damp, and by extension to be shabby or broke. It's a word that instantly says "hard times".

**ヤニカス yanikasu — "tar scum"** An insult for a heavy smoker, mostly online. Sometimes used jokingly about oneself, which tells you a lot about how smokers in Japan now talk about their own habit.

Drinking

**一杯やる ippai yaru — "do a glass"** The standard casual way to suggest a drink. Yaru is the rough verb for "do", so the phrase has a slightly conspiratorial, after-work feel. "Kaeri ni ippai yaranai?" — "Fancy a drink on the way home?"

**ハシゴ hashigo — "ladder"** Bar-hopping. You climb from one bar to the next like the rungs of a ladder. Hashigo-zake is the full form; people usually just say hashigo.

Money

**ゼニ *zeni*** An old word for coins, now a rough word for money itself. The normal word is okane, with the polite o- prefix; zeni strips the politeness off and makes money sound grubby and real. It has a strong Osaka flavour — merchants' talk.

People

**ダチ dachi and マブダチ *mabudachi*** Dachi is tomodachi ("friend") with the front chopped off. Mabudachi adds mabu — roughly "genuine" — to make "best mate". Both sound delinquent-ish and slightly retro: the vocabulary of a yankī character.

**ツレ *tsure*** "Companion" — whoever you're with. In the Kansai region it's also a common way to say "my partner" or "my spouse", which confuses people from Tokyo.

**オヤジ oyaji and オカン *okan*** Oyaji is a rough "dad" — and also any middle-aged man, and sometimes the owner of a small restaurant. Okan is "mum", originally Kansai dialect and now used everywhere. Both are what a teenage son says about his parents, never to them in public.

**ガキ gaki — "brat" One of the most common rough words in anime. It's written 餓鬼 — a hungry ghost**, one of the tormented beings of Buddhist cosmology, forever starving. Calling a child gaki is, etymologically, calling them a starving demon. (More Buddhist words hiding in everyday Japanese: Buddhist terms in Naruto.)

Doing things you shouldn't

**サボる saboru — to skive off From the French sabotage**, via the labour movement: workers slowing down on purpose. Japanese turned the noun into a verb with -ru, and now every student sabotages class.

**バックレる bakkureru — to vanish without a word** Skipping a shift, ghosting an obligation, leaving a job without telling anyone. Its origin isn't settled; a common explanation is that it comes from shirabakureru, "to play dumb".

**パクる pakuru — to nick** To steal, or to copy someone's idea. In older usage it also meant for the police to arrest someone — but that's where we start drifting into real underworld slang, which isn't what this list is about.

**チクる chikuru — to grass on someone** To tell a teacher or boss about what someone did. It's always said with contempt — nobody describes their own reporting as chikuru.

The whole list

Why this matters when you watch anime

Japanese writers use this register to tell you who a character is before they've done anything. There's even a term for it in Japanese linguistics — yakuwarigo, "role language": the particular words that mark a character as an old man, a delinquent, a lady, a country kid.

A character who says yani instead of tabako, zeni instead of okane, oyaji instead of otōsan, has told you something about their age, background and mood in a single word. A subtitle that says "cigarette", "money" and "dad" is correct — and has quietly thrown that information away.

So when Sasaki slips out behind the supermarket for his yani, it isn't just a smoke break. It's a tired man admitting, in one rough little word, that this is how he's getting through the week.

→ Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You on AnimeBuzz

More everyday-Japanese explainers: senpai and kōhai, why anime characters always meet at the station, Buddhist words hiding in Naruto.

Sources and notes

• 松脂 (Wikipedia) — yani as tree resin, the root of the tobacco sense
• サボタージュ (Wikipedia) — the French origin of saboru
• 餓鬼 (Wikipedia) — the hungry ghosts of Buddhist cosmology behind gaki
• 役割語 (Wikipedia) — yakuwarigo, "role language"

The origins of bakkureru, pakuru and chikuru are not firmly established; the explanations above are common ones, not settled etymology. How rough each word sounds also varies by region and generation.