From our other sites
The story
A thread on 5ch’s Hello! Project board sparked discussion over the Tohoku dialect word “urugasu” (also “urukasu”). It originally means leaving rice or a bowl soaking in water, but posters pointed out that in parts of Tohoku and Hokkaido it’s also used to mean putting off a task and leaving it undone, as in “urugasu the work.” That set off a debate among participants over exactly where the word is understood and where its usage boundaries lie. Reports poured in from Aomori, Akita, Yamagata, Miyagi, Tochigi, and even Kansai, and the thread ended up highlighting just how much regional variation exists within dialects — even within “Tohoku” itself, Hachinohe and Tsugaru turned out to have different senses of the word.
What people said
I thought that one was just a Hokkaido thing
Well, it does mean "to discard," so it's not wrong lol
Isn't that a different meaning though?
Re: #8 — I get what it means when someone says it, but I wouldn't use it myself
People from Hachinohe will say "that's Tsugaru dialect, we speak Nanbu dialect, so we wouldn't know"
That's the reaction you get outside Tohoku when you bring this up
Which is exactly why the Pacific side of Aomori ends up disliking Tsugaru
Ainu is a completely different language from Japanese to begin with
Sapporo is said to mean "dry river" (though there are various theories)
Might even reach Saitama and Chiba too
Ah yeah, that's the nuance where I'm from — in Tochigi
That one's probably not used in northern Tohoku
From its original meaning of "leaving something soaking in water to soften it," the term shifted to also mean leaving work untouched and unattended.
Like saying "dame da ha" (it's no good already) or "tsukareta ha" (I'm already tired)
I use "urugasu," but hearing it applied to work is a first for me — we don't use it that way in Tohoku
I'm from Tohoku too, but
who put you in charge of speaking for all six prefectures?
Not sure if the fishing-village dialect ("hama kotoba") uses the voiced version
that's gotta be a pool attendant or a fisherman talking (people who actually soak things for a living)
— from the Murayama region of Yamagata Prefecture
"Egawa uguru" (likely wordplay riffing on the real sports-news program "Supōtsu Uruguse")
Like "don't touch that yet, the situation might still change"
Used this way, it comes up in sentences like "let's urukasu that job for a while before we get to it" — putting something off for later.
It's a dialect word common in Hokkaido and Tohoku, and it's interesting how a single word can carry more than one meaning.
It means something like "it just naturally ends up happening" or "it just becomes that way on its own"
Though, well, my mom was born in Hokkaido
Tohoku says it too
Does all of Hokkaido say it? I'd bet the Hakodate area does
It was used normally in Sapporo too
Background and key points of this discussion
“Urugasu” is a word widely used in Hokkaido and Tohoku that originally carries the literal meaning of “soaking” rice or a bowl in water, but the thread shows it has also taken on the figurative sense of “putting off or neglecting something you should be doing,” as in “urugasu the work.” It’s notable that some posters, unaware of this double meaning, tried to draw a line by saying things like “you wouldn’t say urugasu a watermelon.” Another point of discussion is that usage varies even within the broad categories of “Tohoku” and “Hokkaido.” Replies show that “Tohoku dialect” isn’t a monolith — someone from Hachinohe (who speaks Nanbu dialect) said they “don’t know” Tsugaru dialect, and a phrase specific to the Murayama region of Yamagata came up as well. The thread also touched on spontaneous-form expressions like “kakasaranai” and “yarasaru,” which describe something happening unintentionally — a grammatical feature known to be characteristic of Tohoku dialects. Reading just the headline might give the impression this is simply a story about soaking rice, but the real point of contention is how far the dialect’s reach extends and how broad its range of meaning is.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hello! Project) thread “[Tohoku] Go soak the rice, will you?.”
Leave a Reply