Chapter 7 … What Hina Ebina sees through the lens is…
1 “He must be a primitive… A Chiba primitive…” A Chiba genjin is local slang used by people who live in Chiba for the purpose of commuting to Tokyo (in fact the majority) to describe Chiba natives, living farther away from Tokyo.
2 “…he hasn’t evolved at all since the Chibanian epoch.” The Chibanian epoch is real; it was formerly known as the Middle Pleistocene and was renamed in 2020 due to strata discovered in Chiba prefecture.
3 “He’s got to be from the Jomon period… Does he come from the Kasori Shell Mounds?” The Jomon period is between approximately 10,500 and 300 BCE. The Kasori Shell Mounds is an archaeological site in Chiba.
4 “Yuigahama chanted File Attach! …But it missed! Yuigahama is confused! It does sound confusingly like Fire Attack, though, I’ll admit.” The original gag here is on the katakana in fairu tenpu (file attach) visually resembling the katakana in parupunte, a random effect spell in the Dragon Quest series, usually translated as Hocus Pocus.
5 “…there’s more muntjac in Chiba lately—there’s too many, and people are always going ‘Oh! Deer!’ and I wonder what I did wrong this time.” He’s specifically talking about the Reeves’s muntjac, a species of small deer native to Southeast Asia. Some escaped from a zoo in Chiba in the 1960s and 1970s and have since become an invasive species. The word for muntjac in Japanese is kyon, which is also a character from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and the original line here was “There’s too many, and people are always saying, Kyon-kun, Kyon-kun” (which is how that character is referred to in Haruhi).
6 “Hurr-hurr-hurr, let it happen, let it happen!” Yoi de wa nai ka! is a stereotypical line in period dramas, often accompanied by the “obi spin,” where a man yanks on a woman’s obi, ripping it off to spin her like a top.
7 “Is she Datsue-ba? A scene like something out of ‘Rashomon’ was unfolding right in front of me.” Datsue-ba is a mythological old hag who waits by the river of the dead and strips the living of their clothes. “Rashomon” is a short story by Akutagawa that ends with a man down on his luck brutally stealing the clothes off an old woman’s back.
8 Don’t Stop the Camera! is the Japanese title for the 2017 comedy zombie movie One Cut of the Dead.
9 “Heh-heh-heh… And then you and Hayato…” With a terrifying smile—a slasher smile, if you will—Ebina chuckled at me.” This whole section is a series of fu puns, where the character for “rotten” (from fujoshi) replaces other characters, starting with Ebina describing herself as fujuubun (insufficient) to be photographed and chuckling fu-fu-fu, and then Hachiman describes her laughter as fuon (ominous).
10 “Meanwhile, I was nothing but moved. With this much moving going on, I could generate enough power for a whole city! Though this is moving us away from the point!” The original wordplay here is “But I was so full of emotion [kangai]—how many farms could I water [punning on kangai, irrigation]! Well, that’s kind of the wrong emotion, though!” Kangai-chigai literally means “the wrong emotion,” but it also sounds like kangae-chigai, meaning “misunderstanding.”
11 “…but being in a room with both her and Yuigahama, it was like, Wo-wo-whoa-wo whoa-wo-wo. I almost expected someone to fire off a shinken in there.” This is a reference to the manga Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, and the shinken, translated as True Fist or Super Fist, is a technique used by the protagonist.
12 “Well, they do say a boy will grow so much in three days, you won’t even recognize him the next time you see him…I’ll drop dead screaming.” That saying is attributed to the famous Chinese general Lu Meng, who also appears in the classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms in a particularly gruesome death scene.
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Chapter 8 … While wishing to not go wrong again, at least…
1 “‘So is it just me who’s been personally requested?’ I asked…‘That’s my professional alias’…‘That’s a great name for the number one most in-demand boy in the establishment.’” “Personal request” (shimei) is the term used for selecting your chosen host/hostess at a host club or cabaret club. The word for “professional alias” here is also exclusively for such professions. These clubs also generally have their staff ranked, and their number one will be the most requested at the club.
2 Beauty Looking Back is a famous seventeenth-century woodblock print of a woman turning around to look behind her by artist Moronobu Hishikawa.