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Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Sommelier is constipated: true Internet profiles

Sommelier Kobayashi has been constipated since 2012!
Isetan in Shinjuku has the best food basement of any Tokyo department store, and likely the best in Japan. Seriously. So naturally Isetan takes its wine store seriously enough to have online profiles of its in-house sommeliers, with English translations.

But those profiles ... I'm posting screen grabs because it's possible they'll be taken down after this blog post. Even in Japanese, who thought that telling us about Kobayashi's, er, elimination regime was a good idea?

We controlled with essential oil and Medicinal Herb tea to drink last year and did not drink so-called "medicine", but were made to use steroid from early March because we pulled mind this year and played truant.

Uh, yeah. Another great line from a different sommelier's profile: "We look unreliable, but are a mother of 1 child even if we see in this way." Ohkaaay.

There isn't much I can add to these delightful sommelier profiles. It is every day when we reflect we are impressed by profundity of wine, so please to enjoy and comment with responsible.


A hat tip to my friend Glenn for pointing this out. Let's proceed to live karaoke appreciation but not readily improve!

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8 comments:

  1. Goma SFFebruary 24, 2016 at 1:54 PM

    Really? Isetan? So funny!
    Thank you for good laugh.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousFebruary 25, 2016 at 8:51 AM

    We are laughing off constipated ass.

    ReplyDelete
  3. 1YzYnGyFebruary 25, 2016 at 9:40 AM

    I always knew that word should be pronounced "smellier"... (the "O" is silent, but deadly).

    ReplyDelete
  4. LeoFebruary 29, 2016 at 12:38 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  5. LeoFebruary 29, 2016 at 12:40 PM

    Not sure how this used to read, but it's something like: "do not make fun of people with broken english, as that means it's probably their second... or third language"
    So next time you think about making fun of someone's english, stop and think how many languages can you speak? Is your spanish, japanese, or french as good as that person's broken english?

    ReplyDelete
  6. gurenFebruary 29, 2016 at 6:26 PM

    Leo, I would agree with you if the sommeliers had written their profiles in English by themselves. That is not true in this case, though. Isetan, a luxury-level department store in Japan, went cheap and used the 5 yen per word machine translation service from Cross Language (http://www.crosslanguage.co.jp/internet/365/). That decision and the results are worthy of derision, in my opinion.

    ReplyDelete
  7. W. Blake GrayFebruary 29, 2016 at 6:45 PM

    Leo: Yes, I think it's fair to say my Japanese is as good as Kobayashi's English. And I'm not constipated either.

    Plus, what Guren said. そのとおりです.

    ReplyDelete
  8. UnknownMarch 6, 2016 at 2:02 AM

    "The Language Barrier Is About to Fall" (Wall Street Journal)

    Link: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-language-barrier-is-about-to-fall-1454077968

    ReplyDelete