Gotoh ='s 510 meaning

[Rick]

Japanese is a word rich language like English but it has far more homonyms.  As such, they delight in word play and double entendres ...
This leads to people using numbers to convey a meaning or a name.

So in the show heroes there was a car and it had a license plate with the numbers 3923.  One way to pronounce this in Japanese is "san kyu ni san" which sounds like a Japanese saying in english ... Thank you Nissan 

I could write my name as 09 or Re-ku, Rick ...

In this case, Mr. Gotoh-san is having fun ... one way of saying 510 is: Go ='s 5, and Toh ='s 10, hence 510 in japanese it sounds like Gotoh.

At first I thought 510 was  a process, because I didn't know about their use of homonyms, so I asked the people at the company ... they probably thought I was crazy.

 

[aarontunes]

This is one of those hidden/inside-joke things like the rhythm to Rush's song YYZ, that just sounds too cool to be true.


Are you fluent enough in both the Japanese language and Japanese pop culture to promise me this is true, Rick?


Please say yes!

 

[Rick]

I promise you it's true ...

Here's the story, I asked the Gotoh people via email about what 510 meant because I had never heard about this kind of steel process.  They responded, very politely, that 510 "can be read as GOTOH in japanese," which puzzled me.

I then asked my wife who is fluent in Japanese what this meant, and she told me, and then I verified it with one of her Japanese friends, and then I looked up japanese wordplay on the internet and found this website ...

https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Japanese_wordplay

Then I remembered a book I read by Murakami, called 1Q84, if you haven't read it, read it, it's awesome, anyway the title is a play on 1984 by George Orwell.  The letter Q and the number 9 sound the same, like kuh, or kew, and q also means question, and the Japanese love this kind double or triple meanings.

While I've been to Japan many times, and met many Japanese, I regret that I can't speak Japanese, and I really like their culture, it's very rich and meaningful.

So ...  thanks to my wife, I'm fluent enough to promise this is true.

 

[Cagey]

Well, that explains why so many things they make have 510 in the description, even when the parts don't seem to bear any resemblance to each other. I've always been under the impression that it was a series number or product line number or something like that, but couldn't see any tie points.

 

[stratamania]

Interesting. I wonder what 90125 might mean, if anything, in Japanese or other well-known number sequences.

 

[BigSteve22]

Interesting. I wonder what 90125 might mean, if anything, in Japanese or other well-known number sequences.

According to the interweb, 90125 is the catalog number of the disc.
When I was deciding on a serial number for my Blackbird Telecaster, I went the same route: "PCS7067B3". Disc catalog number for the first disc of the "White Album", "PCS7067", "B" Side, "3"rd song: "Blackbird".

 

[stratamania]

I meant whether 90125 might have some odd inadvertent amusing meaning in Japanese...

 

[BigSteve22]

I meant whether 90125 might have some odd inadvertent amusing meaning in Japanese...

:tard:

 

[Mr. Neutron]

I used to drive a '72 Datsun 510 2 dr. sedan in autocross and Solo 1 races. Fantastic little cars at that time. I thought maybe it was in homage to those cars.......