The Japan Kanji ability assessment association has selected the Chinese character meaning "fake" as the symbol that best describes Japan in 2007.
Xinhuanet.com reports:
The result represented Japanese people's anger over the society's darkness exposed in 2007, including a series of financial scandals involving Cabinet ministers, the Social Insurance Agency's blunder of losing about 50 million pension records and some well-know food companies' forgery of production dates.
My wife was recently thinking of getting a small tattoo, because she's always wanted one, but has never had the courage to get one. So I told her that if she got one, I would too. I was thinking of getting a small jackalope tattooed on my ankle. However, the Chinese symbol for "fake" also sounds cool. But with my luck, I would get the chinese symbol tattoo and later find out that it was actually the symbol for some random phrase such as "stupid American."
Comments
Not getting anything tattooed is an even better idea, but it may be too late to persuade you of that. Just survey a few people who got tattoos 20 or more years ago and see how many are still glad they did.
I had an ESL student (a rather cute young woman) who came to class one day wearing a warm-up jacket that had the word "Flirt" printed in huge letters across the front. I asked her what she thought that word meant, and she had no idea. Another had a sweatshirt proclaiming "Erin go bragh," also with no idea what it meant. Maybe these examples don't sound so bad, but if their shirts had said "ignorant donkey slut," or "irrepressible crackhead pedophile," they wouldn't have known it, either.
Story about a young man who wanted a Chinese tattoo that read "Love, Honour and Obey" but got "At the end of the day, this is an ugly boy" instead.
A poster to alt.language.latin used this to explain why tattoos in languages one can't read are a bad idea.