Too Funny 2

I am not a big tattoo fan even though one of my sons has multiple tattoos. It probably stems from the old Roman Catholic prohibition about defiling one's body or something but tattoos pretty much creep me out. It was hard for me to coach some of my swimmers who would come out to the pool looking like the walking dead to me.

Anyway, I laughed out loud today when I read that Ariana Grande had a tattoo inscribed that celebrated Japanese bbq rather than her hit 7 Circles (I do confess that I had to look her up on Google). These days folks are pointing fingers in all directions about cultural appropriation so I certainly hope someone in the pc police laughs at this silly story. When my son got his first tattoo, the kanji for the family name as drawn by his great-grandfather, he had been given a hanko by my other son's sister in law who is Japanese that she said was the name. I looked at it and told my son that it didn't look anything at all like the kanji that his great-grandfather had used and showed him the hanko that I had of that. He took our hanko to the university and asked his Japanese professor if the family hanko was correct. BTW, a hanko is a stamp that is used to mark documents or art or whatever. They are usually carved out of stone and utilize a weird pasty ink that is most frequently red. My husband's grandfather left a large collection of different carved stamps and I have no clue what each denotes.

Now, please keep in mind that family heritage does have an entirely different connotation in Japan, especially in those who are older folks. My husband's grandfather changed his name from his given samurai heritage name that he had been charged with in the Shinto temple to a name that he thought was more in keeping with what he thought were his socialist ideals. But his socialist ideals were never that firmly placed so he chose a very common Japanese name, the equivalent of Smith or Jones or Johnson, but wrote it with elegant calligraphy that produced the same name but with an entirely different meaning or intent. Still, because of his common adopted name, my husband's brother was forced to do a family heritage search when he wanted to marry his wife because her father didn't want her to marry the wrong caste.

We don't really have anything like that in the western world but luckily my son's professor, a native Japanese man, read kanji and said that great-grandpa's version was the name even if it was not the common, plebeian kanji. As a side note, the professor was so impressed that he had a son of this famous man that he treated him with deference and ended up giving him a biography of his great-grandfather.

The bottom line is that my son wanted his tattoo to be accurate so he checked it before he went in to have it etched in his flesh. Ariana Grande now has to choose whether to go through the process of tattoo removal or to laugh at her own hubris and learn from that lesson. Of course most people's tattoo mistakes don't become news items and for all I know she likes hibachi cooked food.

I am German Jewish, Irish, English. Does that mean I can only eat potatoes not rice and only wear wool and linen? We all need to laugh at our pretensions and shake hands with the fellow next to us on the bus.