Nagoya Dialect and the Marvel Cinematic Universe
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[This is a guest post by Frank Clements]
I saw something about Japanese dialects recently that might interest you. The makers of the Marvel movies are trying to recover the enthusiasm that's been lost due to their more recent films being critically panned and scandals with major actors, so they're introducing the classic Marvel villain Dr. Doom, who is traditionally the main villain of the Fantastic Four (created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee). They've brought back Robert Downey Jr. to play him, even though he's already played Iron Man, and they haven't explained how that is going to work.
But what's interesting from a Japan perspective is that a Fantastic Four cartoon by Hanna-Barbera that first ran in the US from 1967 to 1968 was then dubbed and shown on Japanese TV in 1969. They made the choice to give Dr. Doom (Akuma-hakase 悪魔博士 in Japanese) a comical Nagoya accent, so many Japanese associate the character with funny, hard-to-understand Nagoya-ben. Here's a short Youtube video by NONNON, a Japanese woman who reviews American cartoons, that first informed me about it. According to her, many people on Japanese social media were posting about it after the announcement.
I lived in Nagoya for a semester in college, but I never really picked up the dialect (which seems to be largely in decline, especially compared to dialects like Osaka-ben). Nathan Hopson worked there for a few years, so he may have encountered more of it in the wild, so to speak. It makes the character of Dr. Doom a lot more comical to the Japanese, which contrasts with Marvel's push to make him the new overarching villain for their cinematic universe. Maybe when they dub the movies into Japanese, they'll try to work in an in-joke referencing it all.
[end of guest post]
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Tom said,
August 17, 2024 @ 3:48 am
My father in law is from Tokyo and my mother in law from Shiga prefecture. My wife can switch back and forth between the dialects easily, and when she talks to her mother in the Shiga dialect, her father can't understand what they're saying. I can't either.
Chris Button said,
August 17, 2024 @ 8:31 am
I remember being exposed to little bits of "kesen-go" when living in Iwate prefecture.