Add More Horsepower!

You must’ve seen this kind of sticker too many times before, but have you ever wondered what those Kanji letters mean? We did a little research at Add More Horsepower! and found out that those letters, translated into their Roman counterparts are:

fu i wa tsu yo n re ya ma

Now here comes the good part. We tried to search for all combinations possible for the letters to form certain words. The possible combinations are:

fu, i, wa, tsu, yo, re, ya, ma, fui, iwa, yon, and yama

Then, we tried to find out what they mean by putting each word on a Japanese-English dictionary available widely on the internet. And these are what we came up with, and to tell you the truth, there are so many:

• fu: giving to, submitting to, refer to, affix, append, negative, minus, pawn (in chess or shogi), instructor, tutor (to a prince), widely, generally, captive
• i: greatness, lean on, rest against, medicine, the healing art, doctor, cure, healing, depending on, stomach, twelfth sign of the Chinese zodiac
• wa: counter for birds, counter for rabbits, counter for bundles, ancient Japan, ring, hoop, circle, sum, harmony, peace
• tsu: steal
• yo: over (suf), more than, over, world, society, age, world, society, generation (this word would also be impossible since the letter ‘n’ cannot stand alone)
• re: 2nd note in the tonic solfa representation of the diatonic scale, as in do-re-mi (and yet, this creates an impossibility in the sentence)
• ya: arrow, melting, question mark, eight, valley
• ma: space, room, time, pause, just (prefix), right, due (east), pure, genuine
• fui: sudden (a-no), abrupt, unexpected, unforeseen
• iwa: physical disorder, rock
• yon: four
• yama: mountain

Doesn’t make any much sense to you, does it? Likewise. We haven’t tried another method though, we thought that this guy probably typed his name out in Roman letters and changed the typeface into whatever Katakana font that he owns. Thus creating a jumbled Katakana word with no meaning. However, we haven’t found the suitable typeface that looked like the one in the picture.

So… In the mean time, let’s do a sentence-building game… I’ll start first… Umm… Generally physical disorder steal over four mountain? Or maybe negative physical disorder steal more than four melting room? Okay, I’m not making sense here… Unexpected ancient Japan steal four mountain?

With that many variables, imagine the possibilities! Wait, that sounds like something from the Macintel ad…. Hmm…

Oh, by the way, this car has a quite extensive array of chrome-based accessories. But with all those kanjis, who cares about the chrome?

Facts:
Suzuki Karimun, H 8949 LW, ITB Sabuga parking area, Bandung, West Java.
Thanks to our Bandung correspondent for the photo.