Samurai Shampoo?
(Welcome to those searchers who have come in search of “Samurai Shampoo.” If you were looking for information on the anime, I hope this page if useful.)
I was recently introduced to a Japanese anime called Samurai Champloo サムライチャンプルー. A product of Watanabe Shinichiro (of Cowboy Bebop fame), it’s a period film in the Edo period. It centers around (as far as I can tell, since I’ve only seen two episodes) three people - two masterless swordsmen and a waitress and their antics as they go on quests and such (I can’t really say what the arc of the first season is yet, obviously - check websites if you really care).
When I first heard the name, I thought, “what the heck is (a) champloo?” It sounded like shampoo, basically, but I thought that couldn’t be right. It turns out that champloo is a type of dish native to Ryukyu. You basically take a bunch of vegetables and tofu, mix ‘em up and fry ‘em, and you’ve got it. There’s some interesting talk on the Japanese Wikipedia page for the food. It reads
Additionally, the word champloo also exists in Indonesian and Malaysian (languages), where it means the same thing as Japanese chanpo (’mix,’ ‘mixed food’). Further, Korean also has a word of the same meaning, chanpon. It is thought that each of these words has a common origin, though there are various theories on the exact source. One theory is that it is from the Fujian greeting 吃飯 or 吃飯了 (’have you eaten?’, ‘hello’), or possibly from the word meaning ‘to mix’ from the same language （In the Beijing dialect there is a character with a reading of chān which means ‘mix’）. Or it may be from the Portuguese or Dutch word for ‘mix,’ champon.
Well, the etymology is…interesting… but in any case, this still didn’t tell me why the show is called what it is. Clue number one: one of the characters is from Ryukyu. Then I went to the official Japanese site, where it says that this character, Mugen, practices a highly idiosyncratic style of swordfighting called, surprisingly, チャンプルー剣法 (champloo sword-technique), which basically means that he has a whole bunch of mixed up techniques combined into one (that looks vaguely like capoeira, according to some). So there you go. I also prefer to think that the getting together of these three main characters also constitutes a type of champloo dish. Yum. And no shampoo in sight. It’s a period piece, after all.
Fujian ‘hello’ is ‘have you eaten’? that in itself is a pretty interesting etymology. What other kinds of etymologies for greetings are there?
Not sure. I know most Chinese languages use some form of “have you eaten” as a greeting (and it’s transparantly “have you eaten,” - you can actually ask if someone has eaten yet with the same phrase - as opposed to English “good morning/afternoon/evening” which are at best loosely related to “(may you) have a good …). As for other world greetings, I’m not sure. I wonder how widespread asking about someone’s health/condition is (as in “how do you do”, “how are you doing”). In Japan, for instance, asking how someone is as a greeting will probably … well, not be interpreted as a greeting, but as a genuine inquiry. It would be interesting if it was an areal feature.