Are you mostly fluent in written Japanese?

kestrelrogue

I am working on a tattoo design and I want to make sure that everything means what I want it to mean. It includes these three phrases:

一期一会
英雄欺人
晴天の霹靂

I have googled and googled but there's nothing a like a real live person to tell me what they mean, so please don't just translate them somewhere since those aren't exactly accurate, but just let me know what any of them mean to you. Here is what I think they mean:

"One time, one meeting" - a once in a lifetime chance

"Heroes decieve people" - "decieve" is not intended as a bad word, but rather to mean that they're just going the extra mile and achieving things most of us think we never could, thus we call them heroes, decieving ourselves, something like that.

"Thunderclap from a clear sky" - a surprise out of the blue, unexpected.

kestrelrogue

oh yea, and this one too:

継続は力なり

"continuance is strength."

FruitLover

Why are you getting tattoos in a language you can't understand?

kestrelrogue

FruitLover wrote: »

Why are you getting tattoos in a language you can't understand?

I never said I can't understand the language. I'm just not fluent in the thousands of Kanji in the written language. So far I only know katakana, hiragana, and a relatively small number of Kanji. The reason is, it has a great deal of meaning to me, which is personal, and not really related to this thread at all.

FruitLover

Four phrases in a foreign language have a great deal of meaning to you? I don't get it, but OK...

Let me be a bit more helpful:

I've never heard of "英雄欺人", but if this is a real Japanese phrase, it might just be obscure. Maybe this should be "英雄は人を欺く"? I don't think it has the nuance you're looking for though. The translations you have for the other three phrases are pretty accurate.

Have a think about this though: if you saw a Japanese guy walking down the street with "A fool and his money are soon parted" or something like that tattooed on his arm, would you think

a) That looks cool
or
b) That's pretty random and weird, why did he get that tattooed on his body?

When I lived in Japan, Japanese people used to ask me why foreigners got odd expressions and proverbs tattooed on them in Japanese (usually ones they couldn't even read themselves). They found it funny. I do too.

Cake Fiend

Fruity, thanks for your post (informative as always), but a bit of diplomacy wouldn't hurt!

Fruit does bring up a valid point though, OP. If you've been to Japan, you'll no doubt have seen the abundance of out-of-place English phrases all over the shop (t-shirts, posters, etc) which Japanese people think is cool, but to a native English-speaker looks weird. I've seen a lot of Westerners doing the opposite equivalent with Japanese/Chinese tattoos. I'd run this by a native Japanese if possible!