🇯🇵🚨 Japanese Swear Words You Totally Should(n't) Use 🚨🇯🇵

When most people think of the Japanese language, images of bowing, polite keigo (formal speech), and a society deeply rooted in respect likely comes to mind.

But you, my friend—you straight up Googled Japanese swear words.

Nice.

As it happens, behind Japanese's stereotypically polite veneer, a treasure trove of "colorful" language just waiting for you to stub your toe on it. While perhaps not as explicit in nature or quite as widely used as in other cultures, the language does have its fair share of fascinating, nuanced, and occasionally eyebrow-raising curses.

Here, we'll cover all of the bad words we think a person might want to know—whether they want to learn Japanese or not.

Why learn Japanese curse words, anyway? 

Before we actually share our first glorious bits of Japanese profanity, let’s take a minute to justify ourselves: why should you bother with swear words if you're learning Japanese? After all, you don’t need them to get through your day. Right? (Right?)

Well, here’s the thing:

We thus present you with this golden rule:

Know, but don't use.

Common Japanese Swear Words: A Crash Course

Here’s a list of some of the most common Japanese swear words, their meanings, and when they’re used.

Swearing 101: Tone, context, and Japanese culture

As in English, when you're swearing in Japanese, it's not just about what you're saying.

Consider the following situations:

Hits different, doesn't it?

The context in which a curse is uttered, and the tone with which it is said, has a big impact on how offensive it is. This is as true in Japanese as it is in English: whether or not バカ sounds playful or rude has a lot to do with your delivery.

Focus on the situation and intent, not the word itself

Now, think about the difference between these three expressions:

They all mean the same thing, but adding curse words intensifies the expression. While we often use curse words like this in English, you don't necessarily need curse words to get the same effect in Japanese.

Below are a few common English expressions and the most common translations I saw when skimming articles explaining English swear words for Japanese people:

In other words:

Worry less about how to translate a specific English swear word into Japanese.

Worry more about what Japanese people say in the situations where you would use a particular swear word in English.

Busu and Yarou: A bit of gender-specific profanity and insulting words

As with most languages, Japanese has its fair share of gendered insults. Again, for an interesting thought experiment, take a moment to think about the ways that men are insulted, how that differs from how women get insulted, and why that difference exists.

While on the topic of gender—note that, in Japanese culture, women who swear are judged more harshly than men who swear.

Anyway, here's a short list of stuff you might hear:

Japanese insults directed at men

Here are some colorful expressions that you may hear directed at men:

Japanese insults directed at women

And here are some less than polite words and phrases you may hear directed at women:

A few more aggressive swears for good measure

If you’ve watched any action-packed anime, you’ve likely heard things like this:

The thing is, you likely won't hear much of them in real life.

It's not that Japanese people don't swear, or that these words are fake. Rather, there just aren't really that many situations where you're realistically going to tell somebody to go to fucking hell in real life. (Really, when was the last time you said that in English?)

Even when you think about anime, dramas, or movies—the character's aren't necessarily just swearing without abandon. They're in life or death situations, being cheated on, and stuff like that—situations in which it's perfectly understandable that a person would be genuinely angry and use confrontational language... and situations that you hopefully don't often find yourself in.

Basically: unless you're drunk and picking a fight with the other drunk guy outside of 7/11, you probably won't find good situations to use words like てめえ or 死ね.

How do you learn Japanese profanity if no textbooks teach it?

Let's be real: Genki ain't gonna teach you this shit.

Neither is your Japanese teacher.

Migaku will 💪 ‼️ 🤫

To be clear— while we don't teach you to swear like a drunken sailor salary man, we do give you the tools you need to learn how to do so, if you feel that you must.

You see, all you have to do is watch (or read) Japanese content. People are eventually going to swear. I mean, check this out—it's a kindly-looking middle-aged woman who runs a cooking channel on YouTube. She thought she'd found a killer recipe for lemon pudding... but then, shortly after doing the taste test, she drops a ちくしょう.

Good students with innocent ears that we are, we don't know what that means.

That's where Migaku comes in.

Migaku parses Japanese text on places like YouTube and Netflix (and basically anywhere with text you can highlight) to make it interactive. After Migaku has parsed a page, you can simply click on a word in subtitles or a paragraph to bring up a dictionary definition of what the word means. If it isn't in our dictionary, you can instead get an AI explain what it means, given the context of your sentence.

So let's say that you decide that ちくしょう looks like a useful word to learn.

Just click on that orange button in the top-right corner of the Migaku dictionary.

We'll automatically make you a flashcard like this:

To make that flashcard, Migaku automatically combined several things:

It's kinda beautiful. What's more, that flashcard gets dropped right into Migaku's spaced repetition software, ensuring that you eventually remember it.

Listen up, baka: some closing words about rude words

The way you learn Japanese swear words is by consuming Japanese content you enjoy, encountering them in context, and learning them as you go.

The thing is, that's actually how you should learn normal Japanese, too.

The way we really make progress in a foreign language is by interacting with its media and understanding the messages within that media. If you consume Japanese content, and understand that content, you'll get better at Japanese. Period.

You've now learned a good handful of Japanese swear words, but that's only half the battle. Now you need to see a lot of examples of them being used so you can get a feel for the weight they carry and when Japanese people say them.

Basically: Know, but don't use. (Yet).