Japanese and Dimensions

Sakura Trick - 01 [premux]_001_31737

First: calm down, it’s just a joke in an anime about lesbians.

Ok, so I can see why this was hard to understand. It requires context from the entire second half of the episode, and there were many distracting parts involving very lewd high school girls and something strange happening with the laws of physics. So lets start from the beginning.

Haruka and Yuu are shown coming back from the convenience store during their lunch break, and are talking about strange flavors of Pokitz (like salad). That part is important. Meanwhile, we see Yuzu and them start talking about wanting to eat “yakisoba” for lunch. They introduce the fact that you could misunderstand what exactly she wants by comparing yakisoba bread and “cup” (or instant) yakisoba. To make the latter, you need to add hot water and wait for 2-5 minutes for it to cook and warm up, which is why Kotone keeps bothering Shizuku about that. At this point, you should already have in mind that there are several ways to interpret “yakisoba”, and we have been shown two of them. The joke concludes with Yuu having bought yakisoba flavored Pokitz, a far cry from anything Yuzu was expecting.

もうカップとか言う次元じゃなかった

mou kappu toka iu jigen ja nakatta

もう means “already” in this context. カップとか言う refers to “anything that could possibly be called a cup”. 次元 means “dimension/perspective”. じゃなかった is the past negative noun classifier. Literally, “It is already not the dimension from which you can call that a cup.”

This can be interpreted in several ways. First, if you take it from an abstract point of view, you can realize that it goes back to the entire talk about what yakisoba actually is. Normally it is a food you eat from a plate or bowl, but due to convenience and increased mass-production of goods, it was put into a “cup” form (this includes every type that you pour hot water into). This was taken one step further from the original to make the so-called “yakisoba bread”, which is even more convenient (to say nothing of the flavor). Taken one step even further (one more dimension outwards, so to speak), they isolated the yakisoba flavor and turned it into a snack food. Taken from an absurdist /literal perspective, Yuzu and Kaede were expecting something round, either in the form of a cup or a bread roll. Yuu presents them with a box, which is flat. There is an inherent irony and humor in how far gone the Pokitz is from the original. And yes, I know that going from a cylinder shape to a rectangular prism isn’t literally losing a dimension. It requires some flexibility of mind to understand.

Sorry about the 4-5 typos we made, the first episode of new anime usually has problems just from being something new and also the excitement that comes with doing something fresh. #evetaku, it was TBS’s fault for moving the advertisement to the bottom right this season. To the guy who can’t understand v01.5: whatever man.

11 thoughts on “Japanese and Dimensions

  1. I am no expert in Japanese, but I don’t think this works on an English or a Japanese level. Pocky sticks are (sort of) one-dimensional, but it’s still a really obtuse joke. More importantly, I don’t think that’s what the line was saying… the remaining relevant piece of context that you didn’t mention is that the girl was chanting “Cup! Cup! Cup!” right before (as she was the one guessing they would bring back yakisoba cup noodles). I am guessing the meaning was more like, loosely, “What planet is this?”.

  2. >There is an inherent irony and humor in how far gone the Pokitz is from the original

    Even without the Japanese context, and not connecting the part where they were discussing flavors, I thought the joke was pretty obvious,
    although it really only works in Japan since they have the snacks that are the flavor of actual foods. Of course, that’s funny in and of itself as well, in addition to someone picking it out as a lunch for someone who requested “Yakisoba”.

    The use of “dimension” might be confusing to some people, but as long as you get how far removed the snack is from anything Yuzu and Kaede were expecting, even cup noodles, it works. Guess it helps to know that the “food” flavors of snacks are still funny/weird to Japanese people, too, and humor like this pokes fun at one of the possible (but absurd) consequences of the existence of food-flavor snacks.

  3. My two cents: I think something more along the lines of “That’s a level lower than even a cup” would work better, but the whole thing can be understood on context regardless of the wording.

  4. mmm … I’m more interested in why you’re making this post and what is this has to do with evetaku … because for me, the joke is pretty clear even without the explanation, and I also don’t see people raging about it on your web o.o;

    • what this post has to do with evetaku is this:
      a) it requires you to actually be in #evetaku irc channel to understand a bit and
      b) it’s a running joke that requires you to understand how everyone is like, but here to explain how it goes is this:
      v1.5 is basically a running joke on #evetaku because one of their TLs, puddi, did that with an episode once, where instead of calling it a v2, it’s a v1.5 and there’s the joke, because some people have actually had v3 releases, so the joke’s there (gdi explaining jokes kills them)[also, latter half of explanation may or may not be most accurate reason]

  5. “Jigen ja nai / Jigen dewa nai” is a commonly used Japanese phrase when something is completely…
    1. unexpected
    2. out of question
    3. off topic
    4. too different from something currently discussed to compare
    or such. (You don’t need to think of correct definition with geometry here. It is a metaphor.)

    While Yuzu and Kaede expected Yuu could buy a yakisoba bread or a cup yakisoba. They are different but that is still not completely. For instance, you can make a yakisoba bread from a cup yakisoba easily — just by putting some noodle in the cup onto a bread.
    But as for the yakisoba flavored Pokitz, that was far from what Yuzu and Kaede expected. What they felt there was something like: “We had a argument which was more likely for Yuu to buy something as yakisoba. And finally, we found the answer that was completely unexpected!”

    If I make the subtitle, I would like to write, “The answer is out of the question!”

    • For full disclosure, I knew that it was more metaphorical than literal, but that was the translation decision I made at the time and I don’t regret it. Thanks for taking the time to write out this whole explanation though.

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