Latest / It's All Japanese to Me / Ep. 8 — Fūai: the feel of a material

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Ep. 8 — Fūai: the feel of a material · It's All Japanese to Me

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Rikuto.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: So today's word is fu-ai.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is written with two characters, fu and ai.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fu is the character for wind.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is also used for style or the way something appears.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: And ai comes from au, to fit or to meet.
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  SPEAKER_00: In English, you might translate fu-ai directly as texture or the feel of something.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: But neither is quite the same.
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  SPEAKER_00: The word is used a lot for fabric.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: So let me start there.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Dictionary of Chemistry published by Morikita has an entry for fu-ai.
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  SPEAKER_00: It says fu-ai is a term that expresses two things as a whole,
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  SPEAKER_00: how good a woven or knitted fabric feels to the touch and how beautiful it looks.
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  SPEAKER_00: So it is not only touch and not only looks, it is actually both taken together.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: The same entry lists some of the things people check when they judge who are.
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  SPEAKER_00: I will say them in Japanese.
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  SPEAKER_00: Hari, which is something like firmness or stiffness.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then Koshi, a kind of body or springiness.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then Numeri, a smooth, slightly sleepily feel.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then there is shari, a crisp or dry feel.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then there is warmth.
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  SPEAKER_00: The overall judgment of all of these is the fuai,
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  SPEAKER_00: and it relates to how comfortable a piece of clothing is to wear.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then the entry also says something I didn't expect, actually.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fuai has been standardized and turned into numbers.
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  SPEAKER_00: This was done through fields like experimental psychology,
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  SPEAKER_00: statistics,
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  SPEAKER_00: and rheology, which is the study of how materials flow and change shapes.
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  SPEAKER_00: So it's a word that sounds very sensory and personal on the one hand,
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: and yet there is a whole effort to measure it on the other hand.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, outside of fabric, I also hear who I used a lot for other materials like paper or pottery.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: When someone says a thing like it has a nice fu-ai,
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  SPEAKER_00: for example,
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  SPEAKER_00: I think they mean that the combination of how it looks and how it feels in the hand.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is how I sense.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, that is it for today's episode about fu-ai.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for listening and see you next time.