Pakku on the net

 
Column Japanese for beginners or what to think of anonymous blog commentators. 
 
An unnamed word artist recently claimed on one of these now so modern, so-called media-critical blogs that I, Oliver Reichenstein, was not achieving anything, that I was overrated, that I was a plagiarist. And he was right. On the way to my Friday evening after-work bar, I was mulling over a title for this word artist. How do you pay tribute to sublime contemporaries who get together anonymously on the web and drag other people's names through the mud? Blog snipers? Whistleblowers? Dirty buggers?
I needed something catchy and catchy like the evil Moritz back then, when he described Swiss bloggers as "a single Schrebergärtliguguus" and thus triggered the wildest waves of anger. I was looking for a secure grip for a trouser fly: Bisiriiber? Gloggezüügler? Fotzelchäib? The apt expletive requires an expert: if your grandfather once rumbled: "That's a scoundrel!", then the car dealer in question, guilty or innocent, was as good as arrested, taken away, sentenced and imprisoned. "E rote Sauhund!" from the mouth of the capitalist fighting uncle and the left-wing secondary school teacher was knocked out for good. Löli, blödi Sieche, Glünggi or Sürmel? What do you call people like that?
Over a beer in the Hintergassenbar, I explained the problem to my after-work beer friend Tadashi - which translates as "the decent one". Tadashi initially wanted to know what an allotment garden was. In response to my somewhat clumsy explanation, he said: "Friends of the garden! What's wrong with that? We should start something like that here. Harajuku Shureberugaruten. On a flat roof, you know, drinking beer, roasting sausages on a Saturday afternoon with a view over bright Tokyo. Dipping our heads in the rainwater tub to cool off. Sugooi...."
"Nix Sugoi. Allotment gardeners are not friends of the garden. They pursue each other with cold hatred. They tiptoe to the neighbor's in the dark, dig salt bags next to each other's peas and secretly piss over the strawberries. That's why Moritz says the bloggers are allotment gardeners. - Do Japanese blogs also have this allotment garden mentality?"
"No, most blogs are gomiblogs, i.e. garbage blogs. Specialized online spammers clutter the Japanese web with bogus information that links to company websites. They call this SEO, Search Engine Optimization. A huge charlatanry. - By the way, now I remember the word you were looking for: Gaichuu."
"Ah yes?"
"The beetles from the damage. They ate away my father's entire peach orchard in Nagoya." Tadashi wanted to know how to say beetles of damage in German.
"Hm, that doesn't quite fit," I said after he had stammered "unnugezifaru" three or four times. "Only those who want to attack and destroy the blogger themselves are vermin. Those who use other people's blogs to attack third parties are not just vermin, they are..."
"Booto," he shouted. "Only writers need that word. It's made up of the characters for senseless and riot. Do you have a word for it?"
"Pack. We say pack. Grandfathers like to use that word."
"Pakku?"
"Exactly. Just without the U," I said.
"In Japanese, they say you don't drink sake with booto. But that probably means you shouldn't respond to anonymous comments, doesn't it?"
"The question is: why allow it in the first place? If you can't stand by your words, then there's something wrong with you or your words, isn't there?"
"But without anonymous comments, most blogs would die off."
"Or blossom?"
"Ah, this nasty winter! I'm counting the days until the cherry blossom season, you know. Forty-seven. Why did you want to know all that?" asked Tadashi.
"Do you still have time for a last little sake?"
Oliver Reichenstein is an information architect and lives in Tokyo