Usagi Yojimbo DojoBoard

I've been wondering this for a while now. How do you pronounce Jei's name? Is it said like Jay, or is it more like Gee (as in, Gee Wiz).

From what I remember, it's pronounced Jay. It's kind of pun. Since he's a samurai, they would add "san" to the end of his name, so he would be called Jei-san. A pun on the Jason character from the "Friday the 13th" film series.

At least that's how it was explained to me. I could be wrong.

I asked this question myself a long time ago. There's a page somewhere in the Dojo that provides all the answers concerning name pronunciations.

For the record, it's actually pronounced "Jay".

Don't forget that this is a very thorough website and they have entries on almost all the characters. I would reccommend poking around in all that stuff over on the left side of this page! anyway here's the Jei entry:

http://usagiyojimbo.com/characters/jei.html

Yeah, the pronunciations are great to have.
As morna-san pointed out to me at Motor City Comic Con I was pronouncing my favourite character's name wrong. SHEEN-gen NOT Shin-JEN. Oops. Tad embarassed.

MikeM

heh heh (actually to tell you the truth, I'm not at all sure I'm pronouncing Shingen right)

when I discovered that feature I was pronuncing Usagi you-sa-gi instead of ooo-sa-gi (Stan seems to almost say uh-sa-gi) and Tomoe with only two syllables... It took me a while to retrain my brain but I think it's important to pronounce things properly. Particularly peoples' names.

Drives me nuts that people will call Mike Mignola Mig-know-la (when it should be Min-yo-la!)

Cool, thanks for the replies everyone. I had been pronouncing it Jay the whole time, so I'm glad I was saying it right. I liked that character bio page, I'm gonna have to really check that out more.

Jei is a very interesting character. I think my favorite Usagi villian of all (but I am sure everyone feels that way.)

Here's a helpful link.
Basics of Japanese Pronunciation

All UY character pronunciations are included in the profiles of each character over at http://usagiyojimbo.com/characters.html

including Jei....http://usagiyojimbo.com/characters/jei.html

Kenshiroh wrote:Here's a helpful link.
Basics of Japanese Pronunciation

wow that's awesome I have been poking around in there for two hours! Thanks for the link.

Dunno if I ever mentioned it, but "Jei" can't be a native Japanese name. The syllable "je" normally doesn't exist in Japanese - but a nice pun, indeed...

Japanese people generally render the "u" of "Usagi" as something closer to a [y] than the "oo" of "soon". The "g" is slightly nasal, like "ng" in "camping".

Cosmo wrote:Dunno if I ever mentioned it, but "Jei" can't be a native Japanese name. The syllable "je" normally doesn't exist in Japanese - but a nice pun, indeed...

I noticed this too. You've got Japanese syllables like "hei", "kei", "sei", "mei", etc....but oddly enough no "jei" used in the Japanese language. I looked it up and "jei" only appears as a romanized "Romaji" sound, how you would say the letter "J" in the English language.

Of course, the pun was worth it...

In polish its like "eeai" by phonetic.

but im tryin to use jay

I think so his name could be pronunciations Jay if so..