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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3 Comments

  1. 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.

  2. Chris Button said,

    August 17, 2024 @ 8:31 am

    I remember being exposed to little bits of "kesen-go" when living in Iwate prefecture.

  3. Josh R. said,

    August 19, 2024 @ 6:59 pm

    I'm based in Nagoya, and can say Nagoya-ben is less in decline (at least, no more than any dialect) than it is fiercely guarded. In general, Nagoya folks (and their neighbors, the Mikawa-ben speakers) simply will not speak in the topolect in front of non-speakers. Unlike Osaka-ben speakers, who virtually refuse to speak Standard Japanese if they can help it. (Many foreigners in Osaka will have had the experience of being hit by a barrage of Osaka-ben by a little old lady, who, upon seeing the foreigner's confusion, does not attempt to rephrase in Standard Japanese, nor in English, but repeats her Osaka-ben slower and louder.)

    But I know that Nagoya-ben is alive and well in Nagoya homes because my daughter has picked it up from her classmates in school.

    Tom, I spent almost two years in Hikone, Shiga Prefecture when I first arrived in Japan. The dialect holds a special place in my heart; I knew I had finally made it in the Japanese language when I went out drinking with a friend and his best buddy, and when we were well in our cups and the Shiga-ben was flying back and forth, I realized I was following everything.

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