Epic Bad English Photo Dump

On my last day in Kyoto, I found my favorite kids' clothing store on the 5th floor of the Yodobashi Camera. Score!

Nishimatsuya is still the best place to find a seemingly endless supply of bad English clothing, though I think I can now argue that Aeon wins the prize for highest concentration of obscene children's clothing.

The thing is, my kids have enough clothes. Stow needed a couple of long sleeve shirts and they could all use underwear that fits, so I bought those. The rest, though, I photographed at the store. I generally try to avoid this because on top of wanting to fully support the bad English industry, I also don't want to be thrown out of a store (after all, I'd like to think my stupid foreigner days are behind me***). Unfortunately, we just don't have closets big enough to house all of the insane English out there, so I decided to break my own rule just this once.

I MAY have gone a tad overboard. Brace yourselves.

First, the slightly odd:

You just heart to believe if you want to take off.

Clank! It is success.

Huh?

Sometimes I just can't get enough of those positive donkey feelings.

Wait, what? Universal beating around the back and edge?

Take the high ground and wistfully Boom Out!

The world ties the hand that made me happy. (And, frankly, that makes me very unhappy.)

I'm not sure what to do with all the mixed messages:

You! Just follow your dream, OR ELSE!!

Wait a minute...

Just follow your dream, as long as you're going MY way.

Decisive decide.

No, really, decide already. 

If you don't have BRAVERY, what's the point?:

Now, what I like to call The Warble Trilogy:

My Hot Time--I can't think of a worse tagline for a kid's shirt, but all the awesome SAT words makes it better somehow, especially on a faithful boy.

Raggle taggle you pithy high-spirited kids!

Fly high, you jocund amusing fair boy.

Man, if I had a dollar for every time one of these said jocund I could buy more shirts.

Mirthful? Feeling sanguine? These shirts should help.

I actually bought this one. No bad English, but super tacky and with trains.

Win win.

Last, but not least, these might be my new favorites--t-shirts brimming with grammatically perfect but totally unnecessary English. It's like some overachieving English-speaking genius got a job at the T-shirt factory and didn't know what to do with all that skill.

Such good and pointless English.

As American as apple pie and coveting your neighbor's apples.

This is my FAVORITE. Perfect English in the form of a conversation about playing together after school with a particular focus on making sure they do their jobs well at cleaning time. Unfortunately, these were toddler shirts, so I didn't get one for Stow (who according to size tags is the same size as a Japanese 7 y.o.).

Phew. That's all for now. I just hope the person who proofread those last three shirts doesn't set a new trend. I'm not sure I will survive without a steady supply of bad English children's clothing!


***We have to know each other a lot better before I start to tell you THOSE stories.