屁追い比丘尼 |
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13 May 2025
Occasionally in my study of Japanese I come across a word that is quite funny and perfectly illustrates just how different their culture is. Heoibikuni is just such a word. It was a term for a female servant hired to take the blame for a noblewoman's farts. Just imagine that everyone in the noblewoman's entourage knows what this woman is paid for and yet they still all pretend that the servant rather than the noblewoman has farted. Cognitive dissonance par excellence. The kanji used to represent it, 屁追い比丘尼, were five I've had yet to encounter, so it was also a learning experience. And the last of them added even more humor as 尼 means "nun", so the woman taking the blame for the farts even has a religious significance!
