Bones episode 423
Oh boy oh boy. An episode focused on Japanese people? Yay for me.
OK, let’s just start with a list of things. I have to whine about all of these, and it’s best to get it all over with now.
- The guy who played Ken Nakamura: he looks Japanese, but his accent is messed up and when he actually speaks Japanese, it sounds a bit off. Also, he introduced himself in Japanese to the restaurant guy as “Ken Nakamura” which is wrong; you introduce yourself family name first, like the restaurant guy did (“Takedo Bruce”). My guess is (a) bad writing and (b) the actor is a Nissei who isn’t a native Japanese speaker but knows a bit.
- The guy who played Bruce Takedo: looks and sounds genuinely Japanese.
- The, uh, person who played Haru Tanaka looks and sounds genuinely Japanese. Interesting point: “Haru” is a nickname for both masculine and feminine Japanese names, like “Pat” in English.
- The girl who played Nozomi Sato: if she’s Japanese, I’ll eat my hat. But come on, writers, come up with a more original name than “Sato”, please. (“Sachi” was a good choice of original name, though; I had to look it up to verify that it’s real. I’ve never heard of anyone named Sachi before.)
- The guy who played the sleazy pimp: he could have Japanese blood.
- Back to the question of Tanaka’s gender. (Also, seriously: “Tanaka”? I get the feeling that one of the writers took a Japanese class once and they just lifted the names of the fictitious characters in the class textbook.) Angela apparently looked him/her up on the Internet, and found most of the results in Japanese, “with no personal pronouns”. Now hold on just a darned minute. Where in the hell ass are you going to find gender in a Japanese personal pronoun? Huh? SOMEBODY CALL ME WHEN THEY FIND GENDER IN A JAPANESE PERSONAL PRONOUN
*calm down*
Whoooo. Good God. No, OK? Japanese personal pronouns are not gendered. Japanese doesn’t have grammatical gender even for people. It barely even has grammatical number. The only way you can infer anyone’s gender from a personal pronoun is from first-person ones: some are only used by men, some only by women. But if Tanaka is a member of some subculture that glorifies androgyny (I’ve never heard of this; there are way too many of these subcultures for me to keep track) he/she (see? the hell with grammatical gender) would not be using a gendered personal pronoun. And there’s absolutely no way to infer gender from second- or third-person pronouns. So shut the hell up, partly Chinese woman.
- They can identify that the victim was a native Japanese speaker from a feature of the palate? Color me highly skeptical. I doubt that any language causes permanent changes to the physiology of the mouth. Even if they did, there’s no reason for Japanese to affect the hard palate. Japanese doesn’t have any purely palatal consonants other than /j/ (transliterated as “y” in English). In fact, the consonant inventory of Japanese is almost a subset of English’s consonant inventory; the exception is /ɕ/. It’s an alveolo-palatal consonant, but it’s not an obstruent, so I don’t see how it could affect the physiology of the palate at all.
- Ironically, I have no objections about what little actual Japanese dialogue there was. It’s correct. Obviously Emily Deschanel sucks at speaking Japanese, but that’s excusable.
So they’re looking to hire one of the interns permanently? I really hope it’s Vincent. Clark is hilarious, but not as much as Vincent. Wendell is just boring, although a perfectly likeable guy. I’m not sure how they’re going to resolve it. They all have desirable characteristics (to Brennan) but I can see them going with Wendell because Booth prefers him. And it was interesting that they brought in a random guest character to serve as a pseudo-intern for this episode, to avoid having to make a decision just yet.
Other than all the Japan-related stuff, not much to say. Last episode was a hard act to follow, but this one wasn’t too bad.
