Awesome!

[tundraeternal]

Guess what i just saw, biking home from the station! An anaguma just ran in front of my bike and into a car park, then ran back out and jumped onto a wall! It was closely followed by three schoolgirls taking photos of it with their cellphones, and i asked them 'Sumimasen, kore wa NAN desuka?' (translation: what the heck is this thing?) and they

Comments

[webchicky]

Proof that my year of Japanese wasn't totally wasted: I knew what that meant before I read your translation! Yay for me. :)

[tundraeternal]

Hooray! You are geenyus! I should've actually used 'sore' instead of 'kore' cause it was 'that thing' instead of 'this thing' (it was hiding in an alley at that point) but i was impressed by my ability to put together a complete sentence under duress! Badger related duress.

[ireneadler]

I didn't know what an anaguma was either, but Emlyn tells me it's a badger. We looked it up, and it appears to be a subspecies of the European badger. But it doesn't look much like the American badger! (And how many more times can I say badger in this comment? Badgerbadgerbadger...)

Oh, it means 'hole bear', despite not being a bear. And I was confused, thinking Emlyn said 'whole bear' and wondering why other bears were incomplete, but hole makes much more sense.

[tundraeternal]

Hee! I love the 'whole bear'/'incomplete bear' idea! It was AWFULLY cute. I thought it looked like a badger, what with the white stripe on its nose, so i looked up 'Japanese badger' and there was a photo of the elusive anaguma! Sort of a cross between a badger and a squirrel, if you ask me. Kawaiii!