I live on an island...: ８月３１日は「野菜の日」です！ -or- "Honey, I blew up the vegetables"

Saturday, September 05, 2015

８月３１日は「野菜の日」です！ -or- "Honey, I blew up the vegetables"

Today, my destination was a train station. Of course I did a little window shopping outside the station, too, but the main event was down near the Tokyo Metro subway entrance at Shinjuku Station: giant vegetables.

Japanese people love word play, and they especially love to do it with dates on the calendar: the 29th of every month is the day you will often find meat on sale at supermarkets because 2-9 can be read to sound like the word "meat"; February 22nd is "Cat Day" because 2-2-2 can be read to sound like the Japanese equivalent of "meow meow meow"; April or November 22nd are good days to get married because they can be read to mean something like "good couple"...and so on.

August 31st (or 8-3-1) can be pronounced like the word "vegetable", so this past week the Japanese Central Union of Agricultural Cooperatives (ＪＡ全中) decided to set up a display intended to "encourage urban people to take a greater interest in vegetables". (I love the way Japanese people phrase things!)

I was instantly hooked.

Once I saw the article about this online, I had to go see it for myself. Totally. Worth. It.

Like all things Japanese, the designers went all out. They made the textures as realistic as possible, right down to little details like tiny hair-like roots sprouting from the radish, or dimples on the sweet potatoes.

And the photos lining the walkway were artsy and beautiful, too, of course:

So in order to do my part for the agricultural workers of Japan, I've decided to make this an educational post. Who's ready to learn vegetable words in Japanese? Here we go!

1) Corn: トウモロコシ. Sounds like "TOH-mo-ro-ko-shi".