Header taken from this Kusakari27 post
If I had a nickel every time a small piece of trivia becomes a whole tangent this page would pay itself.
Uma Musume has its own set of in-universe slang, usually involving horses and carrots. One of my favorites is how their version of kitty cat/babygirl (or to be more specific “neko-chan” as in the slang used from one girl to another) is “pony-chan”.
Does this have anything to do with Ponytails or Chrono Genesis’ PONY camera? Don’t worry about it, you could and should be worrying about more important things in your life.
One funny thing about this kind of stuff is that I’ve never gotten the impression that EVERYONE uses it, for all we know it’s more of a cultural thing specific to Uma Musume (as in, the girls themselves). Reminds me of watching Beyblade Burst and being surprised that Beyblade is treated as one of many sports in that world instead of the only thing in anyone’s mind like it’s Pokemon.
But that brings us to today’s topic.
While not very common in usage, one such “umafied” word is “Otankoninjin” (おたんこにんじん), which is a modified version of “Otankonasu” (おたんこなす). The joke here is that they’re replacing Nasu (eggplant) with Ninjin (Carrot). Otankonasu is roughly equivalent to calling someone a “slowpoke” in English, someone careless, forgetful, slow and so on.
Where’s the tangent? Well apparently the origin of Otankonasu comes from Edo-period prostitutes insulting unpleasant clients.
…okay, that’s not exactly how it goes and it’s not even the intended tangent, but I sure got your attention now, huh? Let me take it from the top.
From my research “Otankonasu” is synonimous with “Otanchin”, another playful kind of insult. THAT insult meanwhile was used by Edo-period prostitutes to call out unpleasant clients by basically telling them they have a small penis. The etymology goes that it’s a combination of 御 (“o”, a humble honorific) 短 (“tan”, short, same short you use when decribing short distances) and 珍 (“chin”, the chin in chinchin and chinko).
Yes, literal bitches were doing the “thine honourable boobies” post all the way back in the Edo period to tell clients they had a small peepee.
The idea is that after a certain point it wasn’t chic for a lady to say chin so they used another euphemism so what about “nasu” instead of “chin”, it’s like socially acceptable version of everyone that writes “seggs” instead of “sex” (I hate you all so much and I cannot wait for this last sentence to be an obsolete relic of a bygone era).
But as I said earlier, this isn’t even the actual tangent.
While looking at sources for this I kept finding blogs bringing up the fun fact relatively recently. Meanwhile, Wikipedia and its sources tell a different tale. They suggest that “Otanchin” is actually a shortened corruption of Botamochizura (牡丹餅面) or “Botamochi face”, where Botamochi is, predictably, a kind of mochi, specifically a kind where some rice grains remain instead instead of being all smoothened out into an homogenous paste.
On the more speculative side, this makes sense as an insult if you consider the idea that the texture would invoke the imagery of being careless, like “oh look at you, this mochi still has grains in it!”.
On the less speculative side, Botamochi already has idioms attached to itself, like 牡丹餅は米 辛抱は金 (“Botamochi is rice, patience is gold”).
By the way, since I’m already talking about sources and corroboration, shout outs to Google’s AI going “there’s no precedent for the phrase Botamochizura” RIGHT BELOW THE WIKIPEDIA POST I FOUND THE TERM IN.
So if I had to speculate what’s going on, I believe that the popularly-used “Otankonasu” is a corruption of Botamochizura that became “Otanchin” in due time and because it sounded like an insult to someone’s penis they morphed it into “Ontankonasu”.
That said, if those Edo-period bitches were trying to insult their clients in such a flowery way they add an “o” at the start, I wouldn’t be surprised if “Otanchin” was already common parlance and they went “well they won’t know if we’re calling them silly slowpokes or small johnson man”. Which would make sense since Botamochi WAS already around by the Edo period.
By the way, this is unrelated to the term, but I was reminded of one time I went to a restaurant with a QR menu, and that menu was on LINE and LINE has its own machine translation thing that’s even worse but one of the items got translated as… just look:
To this day I still don’t know what the fuck it was.
Why go on this tangent though? Because it was fun. I didn’t know what Otankoninjin was so I look things up and find out about Otankonasu, and then the story about the prostitute origin comes up and I look into it and here we are.
I’ve already preached in the past about how if you’re researching a topic you should be curious and question it and I’ll be damned if I don’t practice what I preach.
…that said, how the fuck did I end up making two-penis penis-related posts back to back? I swear to God it wasn’t intentional because as the interruptions on main story posts show, things don’t go smoothly when I try to do things on purpose.