Putting the You in Euphemisms

talking about sex in Japanese

My mother doesn’t remember this, perhaps thankfully, but among the Broadway cast albums in my childhood home were three standouts. The Lerner & Loewe classics, My Fair Lady and Camelot, ensured an education in eloquence. To this day, I can hear Julie Andrews singing I will not be bid and bargained for like beeves at a bazaar. I’ve been a fan of alliteration ever since. Oh, and beeves, the plural of beef, are cattle raised for meat.

The third album was from Hair.

The soundtrack for my youth.

At one point at age eight or nine, I had the entire performance memorized. Every song, including the Black Boys/White Boys number, and Sodomy.

If you’re not familiar with that last, brief, number, the lyrics are as such:

Sodomy, fellation, cunnilingus, pederasty.

Father, why do these words sound so nasty?

Masturbation can be fun.

Join the holy order, Kama Sutra, everyone!

Not knowing what ANY of the sex-specific words meant, I walked through our apartment, singing as a choir boy in a full voice. Either my mother had thought that a negative reaction would only encourage me (and she would have been right), or, perhaps, she had never heard those words either. Most likely the former. Masturbation, at the very least, would have crossed her verbal radar in the 1950s and early 60s before her marriage and my advent.

As a child of the seventies and eighties in the New York City suburbs, I dialed the radio to hear Dr. Ruth Westheimer, further developing my vocabulary, and this time with context and meaning. (And, by the way, I think there was a lost opportunity. Charlotte Rae—the actress who played Mrs. Garrett in both Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life—could have done a hell of a great job in a Dr. Ruth biopic.)

Dr. Ruth and Charlotte Rae. The biopic that never was but could have been so awesome!

The gay porn I secretly purchased and studied also developed my sex-specific vocabulary as well, but it wasn’t until I starting living in Japan in 1988, reading and hearing conversations that would never have come up in my Japanese language classroom at Williams College, that I began to realize how rich with euphemism that language is.

Recent conversations with my husband and my own research (and I should point out that the incredible online English-Japanese dictionary created and maintained by the incredible Jim Breen, wwwjdic, is unsurprisingly heavy on Australian slang—Jim is Australian—which itself was another learning experience), deepened my already broad understanding of ways to talk about sex in Japanese.

To clarify, the following are primarily terms for penetrative intercourse. Other forms of sex and anatomical euphemisms would be fodder for another issue, perhaps.

Kanji Nouns

I’ve talked about the different writing systems used in Japan. 漢字 (kanji) are characters imported from Chinese, and among the words uncovered in my research, there were several individual kanji that reappeared in multiple noun combinations.

交 (kō) is also the character for myriad verbs, include 交える (majieru), 交ぜる (mazeru), and 交わす (kawasu), as well as the adverb, 交 (komogomo), all of which refer to mingling, mixing, conjoining.

• 交尾 (kōbi), a mingling of tails, more commonly used when describing sex in non-human animals, but not unheard of in the human realm. The verb form, 交尾む (tsurumu, also written as 遊牝む and 孳尾む), is used for non-human copulation.

• 交際 (kōsai), a mingling of interactions, somewhat clinical.

• 交渉 (kōshō), negotiations, very euphemistic.

• 交合 (kōgō), also euphemistic, a mingling of meetings.

• 性交 (seikō), a sexual mingling.

• 情交 (jōkō), a mingling of feelings, implying passionate feelings.

• 乱交 (rankō), a wild mingling, usually referring to orgiastic sex.

欲 (yoku) is specific to desire, and the adjective form, 欲しい (hoshī) is used for wanting. Pro tip: most adjectives in Japanese, like verbs, are conjugated. A state of ongoing wanting is 欲しい but a wanting that occurred in the past is 欲しかった (hoshikatta).

• 愛欲 (aiyoku), literally love-desire, are feelings that (can) lead to sex.

• 淫欲 (in’yoku), lust-desire, places the sexual emphasis on corporeal desire.

• 性欲 (seiyoku), sex-desire, ‘nuf said.

姦 (kan) is (to my mind) a dreadful character. Repeating the character for woman, 女, three times, the meanings include boisterousness, wickedness, and rape. Ancient Chinese misogyny writ large, especially considering that there is no similar character (in use in Japanese, although there might be one in traditional Chinese) that combines three of the characters for man, 男. The compounds I encountered this character in are somewhat unique.

• 鶏姦 (keikan), literally chicken-wickedness, is the compound used for same-sex intercourse, but only for the eight-year period (1872 to 1880) when said intercourse was illegal in Japan. Some dictionaries gloss 鶏姦 as sodomy or buggery, which would be in keeping with the foreign legal influences that prompted that eight-year (unenforced) ban.

• 青姦 (aokan), blue-wickedness, remains in use today (unlike 鶏姦), and refers to sex outdoors. I suppose 青, the character for blue, could refer to the blue of the sky above you during your Splendor in the Grass moment, but I haven’t done a deep dive into the etymology yet.

I also wanted to include a word about 性 (sei), a character that frequently appears when discussing sex. The character comprises two elements. To the left is the standing heart radical, a modified version of 心 (shin). To the right is 生 (sei), a character with a variety of meanings, but, in the case life is the meaning. Some dictionaries gloss 性 as sex, although I believe that gender is a better rendering. Hence 男性 (dansei) is the male gender and 女性 (josei), the female gender. The notion that our gender is the heart of our life is an interesting one. Even, or perhaps especially, when our genders are not at the extremes of the male-female binary.

Other Nouns

• 性行為 (seikōi), sexual actions, very clinical.

• 共寝 (tomone), sleeping together.

• 本番 (honban), the main event

• 一発 (ippatsu), literally one shot, often (but not always) used for casual encounters.

• 床入り (toko iri), entering the bedroom, old-fashioned and very euphemistic.

• 突っ込み (tsukkomi), sticking it in.

• 同衾 (dōkin), sharing a bed, a literary euphemism

• 媾合 (maguwai), an exchange of looks, a euphemism for sex

• 慇懃 (ingin), can refer to cordiality or politeness in most cases, but also a sweet euphemism.

• 営み (itonami), business, as it were, often seen as 夜の営み (yoru no itonami) or 夫婦の営み (fūfu no itonami), the business of nighttime or the business of a husband and wife.

• 浮気 (uwaki), literally a floating feeling, and refers specifically to sex outside of an existing marriage relationship.

• 愛撫 (aibu), love-rubbing, also known as frottage in English (or my favorite euphemism, the Princeton rub), and referring to non-penetrative intercrural or interfemoral (both words mean between the thighs) sex.

• 発展 (hatten), the sex that occurs when cruising, or the act of cruising itself, from the word for development, because things certainly develop when cruising.

• 房事 (bōji), literally household matters, a very quaint euphemism.

• 桃色遊戯 (momoiro yūgi), peach-colored play. Peach-color is an old Japanese euphemism for sex or sexual organs, what, in British English, are referred to as the pink bits.

• 関係 (kankei), a relationship, but also a euphemism for sex.

• 子作り (kodzukuri), making children, recently common as a euphemism in Japanese gay porn, too.

• 種付 (tanedzuke or tanetsuke), breeding, originally specific to livestock, but now, as in English, a euphemism for unprotected sex.

• おせっせ (osesse), a cutesy euphemism for sex.

• おけけ (okeke), a euphemism for pubic hair and, by extension, sex.

• おめこ (omeko), a euphemism for vagina and, by extension, sex.

• いちゃつき (ichatsuki), literally, a sticky conjoining.

• エッチ (etchi), believed to be the pronunciation of the letter H, as a stand-in for 変態 (hentai), the word for a pervert and, by extension, sex.

• セックス (sekkusu), the Japanese pronunciation of sex.

• ファック (fakku), the Japanese pronunciation of fuck.

• バック (bakku), the Japanese pronunciation of back, referring to anal sex.

• アナル (anaru), the Japanese pronunciation of anal.

• セクフレ (sekufure), an abbreviation of the Japanese pronunciation of sex friend, the equivalent of a friend-with-benefits, and, by extension, the sex that occurs.

• ネッキング (nekkingu), a Japanese term for heavy petting, dating back to the 1950s, but rarely, if ever, heard today.

• ギシギシアンアン (gishigishi an’an), onomatopoeia for the sounds of a squeaky mattress and moaning noises, sometimes abbreviated to ギシアン (gishi an), and a nearly poetic allusion to sex.

Verbs

• 身体を重ねる (karada wo kasaneru), literally to overlap bodies. Horizontal gymnastics, as I would say.

• 股を開く (mata wo hiraku), to open the thighs. Welcome to the Pleasure Dome.

• 抱く (daku), to hug or hold.

• 唆る (sosoru), to stimulate or excite.

• 掘る (horu), to dig or plow.

• 寝る (neru), to sleep, frequently heard in the invitation 一緒に寝ない？ (issho ni nenai?), why don’t we sleep together!

• 孕む (haramu), to impregnate, used more and more frequently in Japanese gay porn.

• ハメる (hameru), to fit (something) in.

• やる (yaru), one of the most flexible verbs in Japanese, with meanings that run the gamut from to do, to give, to feed, to perform, to study, to place, to accelerate, to practice, to eat, to smoke, to drink, to harm, and, of course, to fuck.

In Closing

One of the most fascinating concepts that came up during this research was the (uniquely?) Japanese notion of lucky and unlucky sex workers.

あげまん (ageman) and あげちん (agechin) refer to female and male, respectively, sex works who are lucky for their clients, combining to verb あげる (ageru), to raise up, with cutesy nicknames for the vagina and penis, respectively.

The converses are さげまん (sageman) and さげちん (sagechin), where the verb is さげる (sageru), to lower.

I think there’s a lot of fun (mental and physical) to be had when examining cultural notions of sex and the way cultures create euphemisms around sex. I hope this exploration was fun, if not lucky, for you too!

Thank you!