辛抱し、たわごとを言いなさい (Persevere and Shit)
You know how in The Dark Knight Harvey Dent says, "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villian"? Sometimes I feel that way about Japan, except it's more like, "You either stay here a year or two and die thinking it's the greatest country on earth, or live here long enough to be annoyed by random things." Today's random thing that's annoying me: the word ganbaru.
Ganbaru basically means do your best!, go for it!, keep it up!, or any other generic form of encouragement you'd say when you don't really have anything useful to contribute (for the record, saying the English equivalents to ganbaru annoys me too). The word never really bothered me before, but since moving to a Japanese company full of Japanese people (shocking, right?), my hearing of the word has gone up like...70 billion percent. Situations in which you might hear ganbaru (or even one of its variations, like gaman) include:
I hate my job
Satoshi: "Yo, dawg. I hate this job. All we do is work in the fuckin' satokibi field all day, and I never see my wife or kids. They don't even know me anymore!"
Eiji: "Ganbare, man. Ganbare."
I don't want to go to English school
Masaya: "Mom! FUCK! I HATE ENGLISH SCHOOL! The I don't understand shit and the teacher always calls me fat boy! WAAAAAAAHHHHHH"
Mom: "Can you shut the fuck up and ganbare already? I'm trying to get rid of you so I can go back to watching my TV shows about people eating food and saying how delicious it is! Shit!"
After the earthquake...
Yoshihiro: "So, Japanese government official guy. My house totally got washed away by the tsunami, most of my relatives are now missing, I may or may not be getting cancer from the nuclear plant up the road there, and I am broke as a joke. What's the government's plan going forward?"
Japanese Government official guy: "Uh...gabare."
Personally I think the Japanese should treat ganbaru the same way they treat no and I love you. Both of those things are either never uttered, or said so rarely that when you hear them it's like a shock to the system. Obviously I'm not Japanese, and maybe hearing ganbaru 24/7 really is comforting to people, but I think saying it less would possibly have more meaning. As it stands, it pretty much exists as something to say when you want to appear like you give a damn (but don't have any real solutions to anything) or when you're just trying to blow someone off.