Tell me this isn’t weird: Appealing to patriotism through a recruiting poster slogan written in the language of a foreign power.
Imagine a U.S. Marine recruitment poster in an Iowa farm town bannered with the following slogan above the head of a steely-eyed, ramrod, granite-jawed pilot posing proudly beside his gleaming F/A-18 Hornet: “アメリカの誇り”.
That’s as difficult to imagine as getting through U.S. Navy Seal training if you can’t swim.
In the first place, virtually no one could read it; and those who could wouldn’t get it: “Huh? ‘AMERICAN PRIDE’ in Japanese?! Seriously?” (That’s what the Japanese, “America no hokori”, says in my imagined ad.)
It’s not just the extreme peculiarity of translating a patriotic message into Japanese. “AMERICAN PRIDE” would be weird in any other truly foreign language, e.g., German—”AMERIKANISCHER STOLTZ” (weird even in this century, not to mention the last one.)
When the pride is in the nation as well as in its own language—in both senses of “in”, there is no such problem: One of the first and few sentences among the other useless ones I think I remember from my one college course in German was “Die Deutschen sind stolz auf ihre Wissenschaft des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts“—”The German people are proud of their 20th-century science.” (Try it as an icebreaker at Oktoberfest.)
A Japanese Soldier’s Take on the Marketing of “JAPAN PRIDE”
The poster shown above is not a fake; it’s the real deal: a Japan Self-Defense Force (Jieitai) production—and I know, because I photographed it this May (2014) while standing outside the small Tsuwano, Japan shop window on which it was posted, along with the other two shown here.