Everywhere I Look, It's Chicken

I lived in Japan for a number of years. I found this in a box when I moved to Minnesota.

I’m not going to explain this in detail except to say that obviously I don’t live in Willard anymore and you cannot reach me at that number.

I want to talk about chickens, though.

Learning nuanced Japanese was not a high priority for me. I knew enough to get around and have simple conversations. To some degree, being unable to understand anything terribly complex was appealing. Existential questions? No idea what you’re saying. You want to drink beer? Hai.

My primary lexical interest was learning the edges of the language. One of the primary avenues of exploration to me was the English phrase “Everywhere I look, it’s chicken.”

In English, that statement resolves roughly to this neighborhood:

• I am being stalked by a chicken
• My entire visual field is literally smeared with poultry

This exploits a quirk of English: chicken is both a living creature and what comes from the slaughter of a chicken.

I found this completely by accident only because I loved to come up with the most surreal statements I could think of to see how a native speaker would translate. Many of them worked pretty cleanly, but chicken was a revelation.

The discovery was a surprisingly tense moment in a relationship I had with my girlfriend. We’d been together all day and, admittedly, I had pushed my curiosity to the breaking point, asking questions like “Is there a word for the experience of riding in an elevator?”

Then I blurted it out.

“You mean, an actual chicken, or a piece of chicken?”

“Yes”

“Answer the question.”

“I did.”

She left.
She came back a bit later though.