For years, I’d been wondering what that little phrase was that you hear women sing at the end of commercials for Salonpas pain reliever. I did eventually manage to track it down. It sounds like “Sammy too,” but it’s actually the manufacturer with the name of the title of this post (obviously Japanese). I would have thought it was pronounced HIsaMITsu, but apparently it’s HiSAMItsu .
Anyway, they must have finally gotten the message from viewers that it was a head scratcher, so for the first time this morning, I saw an ad in which they actually showed the word at the end. It’s funny that they’d been singing it for all these years with complete ineffectiveness at conveying what it was.
[Update later afternoon]
Apparently I misspelled it: It’s Hisamitsu.
For years I was too bemused by the name Salonpas to even notice the Hitsamitsu at the end of the commercials. I eventually Googled it, and it’s methyl SALicylate which PASses through the skin, and seemingly the French pronoun ON just because c’est comme il faut.
The kana syllables are Hi-tsa-mi-tsu. Japanese does not have stress accent, but focuses on the supposed length of the syllables, so to an English speaker Hitsamitsu might sound a bit like kh-tsah-mits.
It’s actually Hisamitsu, so Hi-sah-mi-tsu, but otherwise the rest applies.
And the “i” (sounds like “ee”) and “u” phonemes are usually shortened almost to silence, unless followed by an “i” or “u” which lengthens them. That shortening makes some words hard to pronounce correctly. Try to say “father”, “chichi” without sounding like a steam valve.
And I thought it was Stanley Soos.
I think the kanji for Hisamitsu can be construed to mean “Eternal Light.”
Knowing all of this gives me a profound sense of fahrvergnügen.