Love Grows Under my Umbrella

相合傘

I learned a fun Japanese expression the other day. When two people share an umbrella it's called, "ai ai gasa" (see above). The characters basically mean something like, "coming together under an umbrella". We get a lot of rain here. In fact, the entire month of June usually falls under the category of "rainy season".
"Ai ai gasa" isn't limited to shared efforts to stay dry. As one of the teachers at my school informed me, "little girls like to think that when a boy and a girl share the same umbrella it means romance". He told me this after half of our classroom rushed to the window to see a single female teacher sharing an umbrella outside with a man.

In the romantic instance of "ai ai gasa", it's possible to employ a common Japanese word play method and use different characters than normal. Instead of 相合傘 (coming together under an umbrella), we can write 愛合傘 (love meets under an umbrella) . Both are read as, "ai ai gasa".


For the record, the teacher and the man were fixing a fence in front of the school.