eating cucumbers without permission...

Like most anime fans — native speakers excepted — I don’t understand Japanese very well. We all pick up words here and there, but that’s about it. Things are, naturally, complicated by differences in alphabet — “Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou” mightn’t be understandable, but, at least, it looks less formidable than “彼氏彼女の事情”.

Often I don’t ever find out what the title of a series means, since the fansubbers, for whatever reason, leave it Japanese.

Over the past few days I’ve been watching “舞-HiME”, a show about schoolgirls with giant robots fighting demon things. Static Subs anglicized the title as “My Hime”; in irritating-but-typical fashion, it’s also a pun: the protagnist’s name is “Mai”.

“Hime” means princess.

The wordplay is more than just on Mai’s homophonous name. It’s “HiME”, not “Hime”; that in itself is a horrific acronym-pun on “__Hi__ghly-advanced __M__aterializing __E__quipment”. This adds another layer: my princess, my highly-advanced materializing equipment, Mai [the character] highly-advanced materializing equipment, etc.

A search on “My Hime” at AnimeNfo returned no results (and it was this event which you can blame for my entire hopeless excursion into amateur translation), because “舞-HiME” isn’t “My Hime” at all.

It only answers to “Mai Hime”, because the kanji in the title (which is indeed the character’s name) is only homophonous with “my”. It’s a completely different word. The pun on “my” is presumably intended, and is in the URL of the official website, but still: using the kanji for her name opens up a whole new world of possible puns.

It’s probably stretching things a little too far to assume any wordplay encompasses the other “mai” homophones, no matter how delightfully confusing that would get. But, surely, it’s fair to look at the meaning of her name?

Apparently it means “dance” or “dancing”, and this is definitely my favoured translation. See, forget the puns on “my princess” and all that, the show is — evidently — about highly advanced dancing robots. So far I’ve seen swords, giant robots, guns, giant flying fiery robots, monsters, and a freakish half-chariot half-scorpion giant robot; what is left but dancing? It’s just around the corner, I’m sure of it.