Hi folks I just wonder were are the Japanese loan words from?,


Joygirl that's not an English or European slang,



LW

Maybe not, but I'm not in doubt what it means, and neither are any of my players.

Joygirl?
Why would that be a japanese loanword? O.o
Salariman, Omae, zaibatsu, yes . . but Joygirl?

Joygirl has originally been coined William Gibson, a Canadian science fiction author, I think. And I would assume most Japanese words Shadowrun loans are in fact just more or less bad Japanese - though Shadowrun does use 'so ka' relatively appropriately, 'omae' is way too rude to simply mean 'buddy', it's mildly derogative, I think.

It's from the 80s, when certain elements in the US thought that Japan was going to take over the US because some Japanese guys bought Rockefeller Center in New York City. Or some other prominent properties. I forgot the details already.

So it's kind of meta. It's bad Japanese as injected by Western authors into cyberpunk fiction, and preserved in Shadowrun in order to highlight and celebrate the 80s roots of Shadowrun.

That's part of the reason I never was interested in Shadowrun past 3rd edition. By the time they started adding wifi, it was clear they were missing the point. Shadowrun is all about lugging around big thick wires plugged into your head, wielding a scoped uzi, and sputtering out bad Japanese while using the economic situation of the 80s as the basis for the anxieties and concerns of fictional people in your game world.

Simply take any current-day text on how China will take over everything, replace all instances of "China/Chinese" with "Japan/Japanese" and you have what was common knowledge in the 80s. And it works just as well the other way round...

Ah, yes. As someone who graduated class of 1989, the whole Japan Takes Over the World meme makes me terribly nostalgic. It's actually one of the things I really enjoy about Shadowrun; truly, I am a grognard.

I feel the same way.

That site has a real good economic analysis, too!

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anal...kesOverTheWorld

Same here, though I graduated in 90 rather than 89. The TV tropes link is a nice overview.

Sure, the Japanese were going to take over the world, but they were going to look really cool doing it, and then the world would be awesome. Alas, for the good parts of 80's cyberpunk that didn't come true...

You can always listen to Perturbator, Carpenter Brut, or Mega Drive.

I've never heard of any of those, but thanks, I'll check those out.

Retro 80s/early 90s synthie stuff. Personally, I prefer Perturbator, but ymmv. There's a lot of other musicians like that, but those are to my knowledge the most well-known.

When Japanese has been used at our table, it has always been a pretentious "I can insult you in a foreign language and you don't know what I said" effect.

Lions and tigers and bears, omae.