sam42ification said:
Dreiko said:
Mr.K. said:
Simple, Japan loves kinky shit and incest falls into that group of things.
Also alot of times the translations are off, the words for brother/sister in Japanese have several meanings.
It's not that different though, I mean, people in USA use "bro" when talking to friends they're not related to by blood. It's the same principle, only instead of being another word for "pal" it's another word for "older person whom I feel comfortable with".
It's kind of like bro. It's because kanji symbols are recycled a lot and one symbol can mean a lot of things when put with other kanji or hiragana symbols. Dreiko is right the translations are off a lot. Mistakes can be easily made especially if it's an indie manga/anime. For example i have the word chan in a few animes and it was translated to baby. chan is somthing you put after somones name. It's like san (which is a more common version of chan). Like if we were talking japanese you would call me sam san. If i was a baby you would call me sam chan but it's not only for baby it's for people in love, really really close freinds, couples ect. I guess you can call your partner baby but when the subtitle reads sam baby it doesn't make scense. that was a completely off topic example.
I think another reason incest is used is because people like to do things they're not meant to. If there is a button and i sign saying don't press the button, people will press it because they weren't meant to. I think because people aren't mean to imbreed or fall in love with their brothers or sisters they create a fantasy where two fictional charcters fall in love. Just because it's concidered wrong. Also Japanese are pretty kinky.
Chan entails youthfulness so it's not just for babies but for young children too. Due to this, women also get to affectionately be called chan instead of san as a sign of their remaining youthfulness (it's basically a compliment of sorts infused into the honorific) but it can be used as an insult too, when two guys talk at each other and one calls the other chan, it's usually a poke at their lack of life experience and quiiiite angering
.
As for the kanji, there's the ani/ane kanji but those are almost never used by themselves, there's the more cute-ish oniichan/oneechan, the more polite oniisan/oneesan, the more...say...normal niisan or aniki but those can all be used for people whom you are not related by blood but to whom you may have some sort of familiarity.
For example, this summer I was tutoring a couple of Japanese highschoolers on vacation and their mom had a friend of hers drop by as we were having dinner (yep, tutor and you get a free meal together with your paycheck!
) and she had her two daughters with her, the one was a baby but the other was like 3 and so she wouldn't be scared by a tall stranger like me sitting at the table her mother referred to me by my name and added "oniichan" when talking to her about who I was, so she would remove any nervousness she may have felt.
So it's not just about who you're referring to but also about who you're talking to, obviously she wouldn't call ME oniichan (she was about 5 years older than me, if anything I'd call HER oneesan lol) but because she was talking to her young kid she used kid-style-words when talking about me. So you see, these age-and-rank-dependent words morph depending on both who you talk to and who you talk about.
