One really popular pastime for native English speakers, when visiting Japan, is to gawk at and make fun of all the t-shirts with bizarre, fractured, or profane English prominently featured.

This, then, would be turnabout.

My wife has gotten rather hooked on the TV program “Bones”, which features a weekly dose of blood, gore, and oozing dead people.  It is, however, a network program, so it’s very careful with the language the characters use; it tends to stay firmly in the PG realm.

Anyway, we don’t actually WATCH weekly programming, as a rule, but we’ve bought the first two seasons on DVD and we’ve been watching them.

The other night, we’re watching this program, and after a family-friendly 40 minutes of the main characters trying to track down the killers of a guy who was found mostly dissolved in a bathtub full of …I want to say acid, but I think it was actually a strong base.  Lye’s a base, right?  “Acid” sounds cooler… anyway, after the main story is resolved, Angel Booth and Temperence are talking in her office, and  I notice that Angel Booth’s shirt is written in Japanese, and then I have to pause the episode and go back to make sure that it says what I thought it said.

”ファック　ザ　世界”

“Fuck the world”

I’m going to guess that nobody on-crew could read the shirt they put on him, and just figured “Hey, Japanese looks cool, we’ll go with this one.”