Japanese puns

The Japanese just love to play with words. Puns are very common in Japanese media: advertising, TV shows, consumer products etc). The language basically consist of 50 or so sounds, hence quite often you may get a same sounding word with different meanings, and you decipher it through its context and voice intonations.

This is something that is being advertised on trains to promote courtesy among commuters, and I find it rather interesting. In the first ad, the red word is 'Kangaroo' which sounds it alot like 'kangaeru' meaning 'to consider' or 'to think'. Commuters are asked to be considerate and refrain from eating or applying make-up onboard (that is actually a prevalent phenomenon among Japanese girls. They are totally unrecognizable when they alight the train).

In the second ad, the maroon coloured word is 'Sai' for Rhinoceros, but the whole word 'chisai' means 'small' or 'little', encouraging commuters to turn down the volume on their headphones.