"No Men Allowed"

A few days ago, a tattoo artist emailed me the template shown above and asking for some assistance. Her client wanted to have it tattooed on her and claiming the four-character Kanji phrase meant, “no men allowed” in Japanese.

The characters may bear the meanings of “no”, “male”, and “allowed” individually, but they are placing incorrectly in a phrase. To verify my assumption, I then forward it to my Japanese associates to see if they would understand what the phrase meant without telling them the intended English translation.

The consensus is that the phrase is nonsense. It appears that it was generated via “machine translation” or “beisei nihongo” 米製日本語--a term coined by Aaron Batty, meaning American-made Japanese, (as opposed to Engrish) at best.

不 = no, not; un-; negative prefix
夫 = man, male adult, husband; those
允許 = to permit; to allow (the sense of "allow" here is not the sense the woman means. It's more like "forgive," or "let.")

It's obvious someone looked this up, but maybe they just took the "coolest" characters with no idea that they were dealing with a real language that has rules and that random pick and choose is not the best idea.

Also, it makes no sense at all to have the first two characters going vertically and the last two horizontally. It's crazy.

We have a suggestion for this woman, in actual correct Japanese, and looks cooler to boot:



男性禁止 (dansei kinshi) "males prohibited"

Now she can be safe in the knowledge that straight males who read Japanese won't try to coming on to her (no pun intended).