Nob Ogasawara on animal-themed idioms in Japanese

You may not know Nob Ogasawara by name (unless you’re into Pokémon) but if you ever played the early games, you’ll know his work as he translated the text of every game in the core series up until Pokémon Platinum1.

On Bluesky, he wrote about some cool animal-themed idioms in Japanese, similar to ones found in English (e.g. crocodile tears, dog-eared, hen-pecked). Here’s the opening post from his thread:

There are words with animal names in ENG: Dog-tired, crocodile tears, scaredy cat, etc., right?
They also exist in JP.
Like:
狼狽 ろうばい rou-bai (wolf + mythical wolf) = panic
猫舌 ねこじた neko-jita (cat + tongue) = Tongue sensitive to heat (temp)
犬死 いぬじに inu-jini (dog + death) = Meaningless death in war

  1. via https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Nob_Ogasawara ↩︎

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