PervU Follows Fukuppy

[Mike Oxlong]

Japan's Kinki University to change pervy name

Move over Fukuppy, Japan's Kinki University has decided it's time for a name change after years of foreigners sniggering about its pervy nomenclature.

Like Fukuppy, the mascot for Fukushima Industries, the name "Kinki University" doesn't even raise an eyebrow in Japan, coming as it does from the Kinki area -- the country's mid-western region in and around Osaka, Kyoto and Hyogo prefectures.

But the university's dean Hitoshi Shiozaki told reporters this week that he is tired of the giggles he gets abroad when he tells people where he works.

"The word 'kinky' also means perverted," he said. "We have no other choice than changing the English name because we are serious about pursuing a more international school culture."

Kinki University will become Kindai University -- a contraction of "Kinki" and "Daigaku" (university), the school said on Wednesday, but the change will only take effect in 2016 when a new international studies faculty is opened.

Managers hope the move will embolden students to apply for exchanges, safe in the knowledge that they won't be laughed at just for the name of their university.

In October last year Fukushima Industries said it would rename its mascot, Fukuppy, after internet users pointed out its unfortunate resemblance to an English expression that many feel describes the catastrophe at the unrelated Fukushima nuclear power plant.

However, a search of the company's website on Wednesday revealed the slightly gormless-looking winged egg still bore the same name.

Japanese, which has far fewer sounds than many European languages, abounds with vaguely amusing transliterations. No major urban centre, for example, is without its own Shiti Hotel -- the less-than-inviting pronunciation of "city hotel".

[Taro Toporific]

Japan's Kinki University to change pervy name
...the university's dean Hitoshi Shiozaki told reporters this week that he is tired of the giggles he gets abroad when he tells people where he works...
...Managers hope the move will embolden students to apply for exchanges, safe in the knowledge that they won't be laughed at just for the name of their university.

Kinky U. must be trying very hard to be sophisticated and international: They use Blythe as their "image character" to represent the school.

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[Mike Oxlong]

What's it like when Sexy Zone play a gig in the Kinki Region? A lot of applied sociology, perhaps?

[Mike Oxlong]

...The question from a marketing standpoint is why make a big deal about a salacious misreading of the current name in the announcement of the change? Why not just make the changes and let the subject rest? Why go on and on about globalizing the university, then to the extreme of explaining the possible misunderstanding with the word "KINKY" in all capital letters in your press release?

It all seems a bit weird and discomfitting -- until one learns a vital piece of information: the chairman of the board of trustees of Kinki University is Seko Hiroshige.

"That Seko Hiroshige?"

Yes, that Seko Hiroshige, the Diet and the Liberal Democratic Party's avatar of the inapppropriate and overreaching.

As it turns out, Kinki University is a Seko family fiefdom. It was founded by Seko Ko'ichi, Hiroshige's grandfather, who like Hiroshige, was an LDP Diet member. The position of chairman of Kinki U. has been handed down through the family tree, Hiroshige having become the fourth Seko to be the university's top dog upon the 2011 death of his father Hiroaki.

So that which at first seems strained, peculiar and silly, turns out, when one learns the backstory, to be a natural course of events...because this is precisely the kind of change Seko Hiroshige can believe in.

http://shisaku.blogspot.jp/2014/05/beca ... kinky.html

[Taro Toporific]

Japan’s Kinki University decides to change its naughty-sounding name
RocketNews24 | 2014/05/22:
…Traditionalists, long-time residents of the Kinki region, and linguists may be less than thrilled at the new name, as the new moniker is essentially an abbreviated version of ‘Kinki University University.’ Still, if the choice is between sounding perverted or redundant, we can understand settling for the latter, and if nothing else, the school is no longer in the running for the title of “Japan’s most suggestively named school.”
▼ The ball’s in your court, Tokyo Institute of Technology.

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Also fun is “NIT” (Nagoya Institute of Technology)...

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[Coligny]

As usual in Japan, nepotism explains everything...

[Samurai_Jerk]

As usual in Japan, nepotism explains everything...

I wish that were restricted to Japan.