かわいいレゴずき (I Love Cute LEGO) has a great roundup of New Year’s best wishes from our LEGO friends over in Japan, starting with one of their own:
Here are a few more of my favorites.
muntax has built a tiger truck (“寅っく” for a lovely bilingual pun):
Hiro’s tiger burns bright in the forests of the night — or at least in a thicket of bamboo :
Satoru’s tiger bust would look great on any mantle, in any year:
Check out I Love Cute LEGO for the full roundup — click the links in the second half of the post.
Tigers are, of course, the most awesome animal in the Chinese Zodiac. 2010 looks to be a pretty good year.
Definitely a neat post with some great builds, but bare in mind while we did just roll into 2010, we haven’t quite hit the next year in the Chinese lunar calendar yet. That won’t occur until 2/14/10.
Japan uses the Chinese Zodiac but follows the Gregorian calendar. Since this post was about the Japanese new year, not the Chinese new year, no correction was required. ;-)
^
The Japanese appropriate and bastardize a piece of Chinese culture for their own ends? Unthinkable! ;)
Wow. Did you really need to go there?
I didn’t mean for it to come off that strongly, but I will just say I hope Japan is still sending the Tang dynasty royalty checks ;)
To be fair, I’ve been privy to some interesting three way arguments between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese over the history and origins of various traditions, individuals, discoveries, etc. Koreans in particular are infamous in the region for laying claim to any and all shared cultural traditions (the ethnicity/nationality of Confucius being a prime example). There’s clearly been an incredible amount of exchange and inspiration throughout the region over the centuries, although in this case, taking a several thousand years old Chinese tradition and slapping it on a modern Western calendar does make me raise my eyebrow a bit.
大刀向鬼子的头上砍去!
Bwahahahahaha.
For those who aren’t getting the pun, tora is “tiger” in Japanese, which is the first kanji there. The symbols that come after indicate a stuttered “kku” sound.
So “torakku”, which is how one would render “truck” using Japanese syllables.
素晴らしい駄洒落ですよ。