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| Features
| Rumor Guide
Rumor:
Characters curse in the Japanese version of the Pocket Monsters animated series
Rumor Status: Mostly False, though there is at least one instance where it's actually True!
Rumor:
Characters curse in the Japanese version of the Pocket Monsters animated series
Rumor Status: Mostly False, though there is at least one instance where it's actually True!
One of the most common things you used to
hear
people bring up regarding Japanese cartoons from the 1990s is
just how much more adult the
Japanese original was compared to the heavily localized version that
aired in the U.S. There's a lot more blood, nudity, and cursing, and
the American version always waters all that down to make the show more
kid-friendly than it's supposed to be.
While most people understand that a kids' show like Pocket Monsters isn't really any more violent or sexual than what we see in the English dub, there are rumors floating around that cursing is something that absolutely is in the original. But is this really the case? Let's examine a few cases of characters "cursing" in the Japanese original to see how much of this is true and how much of this is due to poor translation choices.
There are a few things worth pointing out before we proceed.
First, what exactly constitutes a "swear word" can vary greatly from country to country, person to person. Is "crap" a bad word? It depends on who you ask. What about "hell"? Or "dammit"? Different people have different ideas of where the line is, exactly, and so for the purposes of this page I'm only going to be focusing on what I guess we can all consider "hard swears," words that I believe most people would agree cannot be said on regular children's television.
Second, while the Japanese language does indeed have a number of words that are considered "bad," cursing in general works a lot differently in Japanese than it does in English. That's because, like the rest of the Japanese language itself, the same one phrase can be interpreted any number of ways depending on any number of factors.
Take the phrase Iitai nani o yatteirunda!? (一体何をやっているんだ⁉), for example. Depending on the context, this phrase can mean anything from "What in the world are you doing?" (fairly benign) to "What the heck are you doing?" (a little harsher, but still not that rude) to "What the hell are you doing?" (you might get in trouble if you say this in school) to even "What the fuck are you doing!?" (you'll definitely get in trouble if you say this in school). In Japanese it's all one phrase, but in English it can be as pleasant or as harsh as the translator feels is appropriate.
Or the phrase kono yarou! (この野郎！). This can be rendered as "you jerk!," "you idiot!," "you swine!," "you scumbag!," "you bitch!," "you asshole!," "you motherfucker!," etc. depending on a number of factors including who's the one saying it, who're they're saying it to, what situation they're in when they're saying it, what kind of show they're saying it in, etc.
In the context of the children's cartoon Pocket Monsters, I think most of us can agree that translating a phrase like Iitai nani o yatteirunda!? as "What the fuck are you doing!?," or kono yarou! as "you bitch!," for example, would both be completely inappropriate and also not at all in line with what we see in the rest of the show.
One more note and then I promise we'll get to the good stuff. In the examples below, I'm purposefully obscuring the names of individuals / fansub groups who made the contributions you see below because I don't want any of this to be taken as a license to harass fans for their translation choices. They're only being included for reference's sake so please, please do not seek any of these people out and shower them with negativity.
Now that we've got all that out of the way let's take a look at some examples.
On January 6th, 2024 a number of new episode titles for the Pocket Monsters (2023) series were made public for the first time, and among them was the title for Japanese Episode 037 "Hogator Turns Bad!?" (ホゲータ、ワルになる⁉) Other translations you'll see online include "Hogator, You're Becoming a Delinquent?!" (Bulbapedia), "Hogator Becomes a Bad Boy?!" (Pocketmonsters.net and Serebii.net), and "Fuecoco…Becomes a Crook?!" (TPCi's official English dub).
The initial fan translations that came out January 6th, 2024, however, decided to go with a somewhat more eyebrow raising translation:
This "Hogator, You're a Badass?!" interpretation of the title caught on, with even sites like Bulbapedia running with it for a little while.
So how did this translation come to be? The Japanese title, when written out in our alphabet, is Hogeeta, Waru ni Naru!? Hogeeta is the Pokémon name Hogator ("Fuecoco"), and the ni Naru (になる) part at the end means "to become" or "is a ___." So, "Hogator, You're a ___." But what about the "waru" (ワル) part in the middle? When you copy/paste the Japanese ワル into machine translation sites like Google Translate you get this:
So "waru" means "badass," huh? So that means Hogeeta, Waru ni Naru!? must mean "Hogator, You're a Badass!?" Case closed, right?
The thing is, Google Translate is notoriously awful when it comes to deciphering super context specific languages like Japanese. It's gotten better over the years, admittedly, but it's still nowhere close to being a reliable source. It isn't smart enough to understand context, nor is it robust enough to offer multiple possibilities for the same word. It literally just regurgitates whatever is in its database and calls it a day. If you look on literally any other online dictionary, meanwhile, you'll see that "badass" is nowhere to be found:
"Badass" as a translation of the Japanese word Waru is fairly dubious to begin with, but especially in the context of an episode title for the children's cartoon Pocket Monsters.
So in this case, I would mark the claim that the Japanese version "curses" as False.
Back in the 1990s, there weren't any fansub groups out there translating the original Pocket Monsters series week after week. For the first few years of the franchise's life, in fact, the only original series episodes you could even find fansubbed versions of were pretty much limited to the three episodes 4Kids skipped: "Holiday in Aopulco," "The Legend of Miniryu," and "Cyber Soldier Porygon."
Since there was no single group of Pokémon fans dedicated to fansubbing the series the job of translating these episodes often fell to groups who, quite frankly, didn't know what they were doing. The translations in these releases were generally quite poor, with the group seemingly not knowing enough Japanese to catch everything the characters were saying and so a lot of the dialogue was just kind of made up. And then also, these fansubs tended to add in characters swearing, just because.
One particularly egregious example of this comes from an old VHS fansub of Pocket Monsters (1997) Episode 018 "Holiday in Aopulco," which liked to have Satoshi say "you bastard!" for some bizarre reason. The first time this happens is right before the show goes to commercial break:
Showing a screenshot like this out of context isn't particularly useful for the purposes of this article and so let's take a look at the dialogue leading up to this line to figure out what's going on. The original Japanese is on the left, my translation is in the middle, and the fansub's "translation" is on the right:
In the original Japanese Satoshi's last line here has him saying aitsura! (あいつら！), a phrase that simply means "those guys!" or "those jerks!"
In the second half of the episode, meanwhile, Satoshi stands up and shouts out ano yarou! (あの野郎！), a cousin of the kono yarou! phrase I mentioned at the beginning of this article, in response to a taunt from his rival Shigeru. The fansub decides "You bastard!" is the appropriate translation here.
But is it...? Let's look at the rest of the dialogue and see for ourselves.
I think most of us would agree that "bastard!" is a pretty out-there interpretation of both aitsura! and ano yarou!, given who's saying this (the main character in the show Pocket Monsters) and what he's saying it to (the episode's bad guys and his rival showing off a bunch of his adoring fans).
So in this case, I would mark the claim that the Japanese version "curses" as False.
One of the more popular examples of "cursing" in Pokémon comes from this fansub of the tenth movie, Pocket Monsters The Movie Diamond & Pearl "Dialga vs. Palkia vs. Darkrai." The scene in question happens toward the end of the film, where Satoshi lets Palkia know how he really feels about it:
This "Palkia, you son of a bitch!" image has spread far and wide, and by now the fact that this isn't what Satoshi's actually saying is already common knowledge. But let's break this down anyway.
The Japanese line here is Parukia no baka yarou! (パルキアのバカ野郎！), a line I would translate as simply "Stupid Palkia!" The original line isn't exactly nice either, but given what's happening in this part of the movie I'd say it's a perfectly understandable thing for a ten-year-old kid to shout out. The star of this sentence is baka yarou! (バカ野郎, though 馬鹿野郎 is also seen), a word that's a lot like the phrase kono yarou I mentioned earlier in that it can mean different things in different situations. However, I think most people would settle on some variation of "idiot" as their go-to translation.
Our good friend Google Translate, however, has a different approach:
In the case of Pocket Monsters, having Satoshi refer to, well, anyone as a "son of a bitch" or "stupid bastard" is obviously extremely out-of-character. At this point, basic common sense has to come into play.
So does Satoshi call Palkia a "son of a bitch" in the original? The answer to that is, obviously, False.
This last one is going to be an easy one because it involves an English curse word for a change. Does the Kuchiba City Gym Leader Matisse yell out the word "goddamn" in the Japanese version?
As it turns out, the answer is yes! In the Japanese version of Episode 014 of the original Pocket Monsters (1997) animated series, "Electric Shock Showdown! The Kuchiba Gym," the Gym Leader Matisse says the word "goddamn (ガッ デム！)," in English, during the part in the second half where his Raichu first starts losing to Satoshi's Pikachu.
Here's the full dialogue of the scene, for context:
The obvious question here is why a word like "goddamn" would even showed up in a kids' cartoon like Pocket Monsters in the first place. And, well, I don't really have a good answer for that. Nineties Japanese cartoons like Pocket Monsters often relied on broad stereotypes when depicting American characters, and one of those stereotypes includes them saying English curse words that no other character in the show would ever utter. While Matisse's American nationality or military service from the games is never actually brought up in the animated series, the character's liberal use of English (including this one curse word) could have been the reason Matisse curses like, well, like a sailor.
It's also worth pointing out that Japanese media doesn't really seem to care one way or the other when it comes to foreign language curse words. Hollywood movies that air on prime time Japanese TV (so like 8:00 PM) are typically presented in both Japanese and English -- there's a button on Japanese TV remotes that allows you to switch language tracks -- and I've never seen an English audio track being edited for language. The Die Hard movies are a favorite of Japanese network TV, and yet I've never seen any of them edited for language.
American pop songs, similarly, get to play uncensored on radio stations and shopping malls. If I can share a personal anecdote for a moment, I remember being in line at a Japanese Baskin-Robbins store this one time and hearing the store play Cardi B.'s and Megan Thee Stallion's "WAP" over its in-store speakers, completely uncensored. I seemed to be the only person in the store to even notice.
Anyway, when it comes to a Gym Leader cursing in the Japanese version, the answer is very clear cut; this one time is True.
While most people understand that a kids' show like Pocket Monsters isn't really any more violent or sexual than what we see in the English dub, there are rumors floating around that cursing is something that absolutely is in the original. But is this really the case? Let's examine a few cases of characters "cursing" in the Japanese original to see how much of this is true and how much of this is due to poor translation choices.
| A note about cursing |
There are a few things worth pointing out before we proceed.
First, what exactly constitutes a "swear word" can vary greatly from country to country, person to person. Is "crap" a bad word? It depends on who you ask. What about "hell"? Or "dammit"? Different people have different ideas of where the line is, exactly, and so for the purposes of this page I'm only going to be focusing on what I guess we can all consider "hard swears," words that I believe most people would agree cannot be said on regular children's television.
Second, while the Japanese language does indeed have a number of words that are considered "bad," cursing in general works a lot differently in Japanese than it does in English. That's because, like the rest of the Japanese language itself, the same one phrase can be interpreted any number of ways depending on any number of factors.
Take the phrase Iitai nani o yatteirunda!? (一体何をやっているんだ⁉), for example. Depending on the context, this phrase can mean anything from "What in the world are you doing?" (fairly benign) to "What the heck are you doing?" (a little harsher, but still not that rude) to "What the hell are you doing?" (you might get in trouble if you say this in school) to even "What the fuck are you doing!?" (you'll definitely get in trouble if you say this in school). In Japanese it's all one phrase, but in English it can be as pleasant or as harsh as the translator feels is appropriate.
Or the phrase kono yarou! (この野郎！). This can be rendered as "you jerk!," "you idiot!," "you swine!," "you scumbag!," "you bitch!," "you asshole!," "you motherfucker!," etc. depending on a number of factors including who's the one saying it, who're they're saying it to, what situation they're in when they're saying it, what kind of show they're saying it in, etc.
In the context of the children's cartoon Pocket Monsters, I think most of us can agree that translating a phrase like Iitai nani o yatteirunda!? as "What the fuck are you doing!?," or kono yarou! as "you bitch!," for example, would both be completely inappropriate and also not at all in line with what we see in the rest of the show.
| One more thing |
One more note and then I promise we'll get to the good stuff. In the examples below, I'm purposefully obscuring the names of individuals / fansub groups who made the contributions you see below because I don't want any of this to be taken as a license to harass fans for their translation choices. They're only being included for reference's sake so please, please do not seek any of these people out and shower them with negativity.
| "Badass" |
Now that we've got all that out of the way let's take a look at some examples.
On January 6th, 2024 a number of new episode titles for the Pocket Monsters (2023) series were made public for the first time, and among them was the title for Japanese Episode 037 "Hogator Turns Bad!?" (ホゲータ、ワルになる⁉) Other translations you'll see online include "Hogator, You're Becoming a Delinquent?!" (Bulbapedia), "Hogator Becomes a Bad Boy?!" (Pocketmonsters.net and Serebii.net), and "Fuecoco…Becomes a Crook?!" (TPCi's official English dub).
The initial fan translations that came out January 6th, 2024, however, decided to go with a somewhat more eyebrow raising translation:
This "Hogator, You're a Badass?!" interpretation of the title caught on, with even sites like Bulbapedia running with it for a little while.
So how did this translation come to be? The Japanese title, when written out in our alphabet, is Hogeeta, Waru ni Naru!? Hogeeta is the Pokémon name Hogator ("Fuecoco"), and the ni Naru (になる) part at the end means "to become" or "is a ___." So, "Hogator, You're a ___." But what about the "waru" (ワル) part in the middle? When you copy/paste the Japanese ワル into machine translation sites like Google Translate you get this:
So "waru" means "badass," huh? So that means Hogeeta, Waru ni Naru!? must mean "Hogator, You're a Badass!?" Case closed, right?
The thing is, Google Translate is notoriously awful when it comes to deciphering super context specific languages like Japanese. It's gotten better over the years, admittedly, but it's still nowhere close to being a reliable source. It isn't smart enough to understand context, nor is it robust enough to offer multiple possibilities for the same word. It literally just regurgitates whatever is in its database and calls it a day. If you look on literally any other online dictionary, meanwhile, you'll see that "badass" is nowhere to be found:
 |
| weblio definition |
 |
| Jim Breen's WWWJDIC
definition |
 |
| ChatGPT answer |
"Badass" as a translation of the Japanese word Waru is fairly dubious to begin with, but especially in the context of an episode title for the children's cartoon Pocket Monsters.
So in this case, I would mark the claim that the Japanese version "curses" as False.
| "Bastard" |
Back in the 1990s, there weren't any fansub groups out there translating the original Pocket Monsters series week after week. For the first few years of the franchise's life, in fact, the only original series episodes you could even find fansubbed versions of were pretty much limited to the three episodes 4Kids skipped: "Holiday in Aopulco," "The Legend of Miniryu," and "Cyber Soldier Porygon."
Since there was no single group of Pokémon fans dedicated to fansubbing the series the job of translating these episodes often fell to groups who, quite frankly, didn't know what they were doing. The translations in these releases were generally quite poor, with the group seemingly not knowing enough Japanese to catch everything the characters were saying and so a lot of the dialogue was just kind of made up. And then also, these fansubs tended to add in characters swearing, just because.
One particularly egregious example of this comes from an old VHS fansub of Pocket Monsters (1997) Episode 018 "Holiday in Aopulco," which liked to have Satoshi say "you bastard!" for some bizarre reason. The first time this happens is right before the show goes to commercial break:
Showing a screenshot like this out of context isn't particularly useful for the purposes of this article and so let's take a look at the dialogue leading up to this line to figure out what's going on. The original Japanese is on the left, my translation is in the middle, and the fansub's "translation" is on the right:
| Japanese
(original) |
Japanese
(translated) |
Fansub
Dialogue |
| オババ 「期限はあしただからね。あしたまでに払えないときはあんたの船を頂く
ババ」 |
Obaba: "You've got until
tomorrow. If you can't pay by tomorrow I'm taking your boat ba-ba." |
Obaba: "Tomorrow's the final
deadline. If you can't pay by tomorrow, I'll take your boat instead." |
| リュウ 「ま…待ってくれ！あの船だけは勘弁してくれ！」 |
Ryuu: "Wait, no! Anything but
my boat!" |
Ryuu: "Please, wait! I can't
give you my boat!" |
| オババ 「ダメババ」 |
Obaba: "Too bad ba-ba." |
Obaba: "You'll have to." |
| コジロウ 「ダメだってさ」 |
Kojirou: "You heard her." |
Kojirou: "It's because we're
better." |
| ムサシ 「残念でした」 |
Musashi: "Aw, too bad." |
Musashi: "Later, losers!" |
| ニャース 「おあいにくだニャース」 |
Nyarth: "It's really
unfortunate Nyarth." |
Nyarth: "I'm going to love
this!" |
| ロケット団 「べーだ！ナーッハッハッハ！いい気味な感じ～！」 |
Rocket-Dan: "Me~h! Ahahahaha!
This feels great!" |
Rocket-Dan: "Someone better
help you!" |
| サトシ 「ううっ…あいつら！」 |
Satoshi: "Ooh...those guys..." |
Satoshi: "Those bastards!" |
In the original Japanese Satoshi's last line here has him saying aitsura! (あいつら！), a phrase that simply means "those guys!" or "those jerks!"
In the second half of the episode, meanwhile, Satoshi stands up and shouts out ano yarou! (あの野郎！), a cousin of the kono yarou! phrase I mentioned at the beginning of this article, in response to a taunt from his rival Shigeru. The fansub decides "You bastard!" is the appropriate translation here.
But is it...? Let's look at the rest of the dialogue and see for ourselves.
| Japanese
(original) |
Japanese
(translated) |
Fansub
Dialogue |
| シゲル 「この会場のどこかにいるサトシまいったか？お前なんか相手にしてるわ
けじゃないけどオレのガールフレンドたちを見せてやろうと思って来てやったぜ」 |
Shigeru: "Is a boy named
Satoshi around here somewhere? I'm not here to see him or anything, I
just stopped by to show off all these beautiful girlfriends!." |
Shigeru: "I know you think I
want to fight, Satoshi. But that's not worth my time. Look at how
pretty my girlfriends are instead." |
| 美女軍団 「いいぞいいぞシゲル！頑張れ頑張れシゲル！」 |
Beauty Army: "That's it!
That's it! Shi-ge-ru! You've got this, you've got this! Shi-ge-ru!" |
Beauty Army: "Go! Go! Shigeru!
Do your best! Do your best! Shigeru!" |
| シゲル 「やあ ありがとう、ありがとう！サートシ君、見てる？」 |
Shigeru: "Aw, thank you! Thank
you! Jealous yet, Sa~toshi-kun!" |
Shigeru: "Yeah! Thank you,
thank you. Satoshi-kun, do you see?" |
| ピカチュウ 「ピッ！」 |
Pikachu: "Pi!" |
(no
sub) |
| サトシ 「あの野郎！」 |
Satoshi: "What a jerk...!" |
Satoshi: "You bastard!" |
I think most of us would agree that "bastard!" is a pretty out-there interpretation of both aitsura! and ano yarou!, given who's saying this (the main character in the show Pocket Monsters) and what he's saying it to (the episode's bad guys and his rival showing off a bunch of his adoring fans).
So in this case, I would mark the claim that the Japanese version "curses" as False.
| "Bitch" |
One of the more popular examples of "cursing" in Pokémon comes from this fansub of the tenth movie, Pocket Monsters The Movie Diamond & Pearl "Dialga vs. Palkia vs. Darkrai." The scene in question happens toward the end of the film, where Satoshi lets Palkia know how he really feels about it:
This "Palkia, you son of a bitch!" image has spread far and wide, and by now the fact that this isn't what Satoshi's actually saying is already common knowledge. But let's break this down anyway.
The Japanese line here is Parukia no baka yarou! (パルキアのバカ野郎！), a line I would translate as simply "Stupid Palkia!" The original line isn't exactly nice either, but given what's happening in this part of the movie I'd say it's a perfectly understandable thing for a ten-year-old kid to shout out. The star of this sentence is baka yarou! (バカ野郎, though 馬鹿野郎 is also seen), a word that's a lot like the phrase kono yarou I mentioned earlier in that it can mean different things in different situations. However, I think most people would settle on some variation of "idiot" as their go-to translation.
 |
| weblio
definition |
Our good friend Google Translate, however, has a different approach:
 |
| Google
Translate |
In the case of Pocket Monsters, having Satoshi refer to, well, anyone as a "son of a bitch" or "stupid bastard" is obviously extremely out-of-character. At this point, basic common sense has to come into play.
So does Satoshi call Palkia a "son of a bitch" in the original? The answer to that is, obviously, False.
| "Goddamn" |
This last one is going to be an easy one because it involves an English curse word for a change. Does the Kuchiba City Gym Leader Matisse yell out the word "goddamn" in the Japanese version?
As it turns out, the answer is yes! In the Japanese version of Episode 014 of the original Pocket Monsters (1997) animated series, "Electric Shock Showdown! The Kuchiba Gym," the Gym Leader Matisse says the word "goddamn (ガッ デム！)," in English, during the part in the second half where his Raichu first starts losing to Satoshi's Pikachu.
Here's the full dialogue of the scene, for context:
| Japanese
(original) |
Japanese
(translated) |
English
Dub |
| サトシ 「お前のライチュウは早く動けない！そこが弱点なんだ！」 |
Satoshi: "Your Raichu can't
move very fast, can it? That's
its weakness!" |
Ash: "Your Raichu's way too
slow, Surge! That's its
weakness!" |
| マチス 「ガッデム！ライチュウ、ベイビーの動きを封じろ！」 |
Matisse: "Goddamn it! Raichu,
stop that Baby's movements in its tracks!" |
Lt. Surge: "Oooookay Raichu,
give it a Thunderbolt. Shut it down!" |
The obvious question here is why a word like "goddamn" would even showed up in a kids' cartoon like Pocket Monsters in the first place. And, well, I don't really have a good answer for that. Nineties Japanese cartoons like Pocket Monsters often relied on broad stereotypes when depicting American characters, and one of those stereotypes includes them saying English curse words that no other character in the show would ever utter. While Matisse's American nationality or military service from the games is never actually brought up in the animated series, the character's liberal use of English (including this one curse word) could have been the reason Matisse curses like, well, like a sailor.
It's also worth pointing out that Japanese media doesn't really seem to care one way or the other when it comes to foreign language curse words. Hollywood movies that air on prime time Japanese TV (so like 8:00 PM) are typically presented in both Japanese and English -- there's a button on Japanese TV remotes that allows you to switch language tracks -- and I've never seen an English audio track being edited for language. The Die Hard movies are a favorite of Japanese network TV, and yet I've never seen any of them edited for language.
American pop songs, similarly, get to play uncensored on radio stations and shopping malls. If I can share a personal anecdote for a moment, I remember being in line at a Japanese Baskin-Robbins store this one time and hearing the store play Cardi B.'s and Megan Thee Stallion's "WAP" over its in-store speakers, completely uncensored. I seemed to be the only person in the store to even notice.
Anyway, when it comes to a Gym Leader cursing in the Japanese version, the answer is very clear cut; this one time is True.
And that's all I've
got for now! I've heard rumors there are some fansubs of the Pocket Monsters The Origin limited
series and the Pocket Monsters Best Wishes!
TV series that add in characters saying "hell" and "damn" but wasn't
able to track those down myself to include for this article. So if you
have those and can confirm, or if you know of any other instance of
characters "cursing" in the Japanese version of the show, please let me
know!
Found an error or omission? Please help me keep this page current and error-free by e-mailing me with a description of the issue.
