Yatta!

Yatta, oh yatta! I think this is the first Japanese word I learned, maybe even before evening knowing the band Styx existed to teach me the wonders of “domo” and “arigato” (and if you don’t use Mr. Roboto as your chaser here, folks, you are either a Japanese person sick of the connotations now created by that hit tune of the 80s when it comes to your way of saying “thank you” or you are one of those anti-Robotite prudes still lost in the era that gave you Come Sail Away instead of Babe). I remember first hearing the word when I was maybe eleven or twelve uttered by a Chinese woman with tremendous thighs. Her name was Chun-Li and her ability to kick really fast netted me with many wins in the great arcade battles of 1991. Street Fighter II had found it’s way to the small arcade near my father’s apartment and it was given the prime placement location of being near the doorway. You could hear the sound effects from the parking lot. Lines would form to the back of the place, soda sticky fingers waiting impatiently to fondle the buttons as though they were a lover. This was one of the last arcades in Cornwall now that Nintendos and Segas were filling homes across town and by all accounts the era of the arcade should have died when Mario stomped his first Goomba. Street Fighter II would extend the life of the arcade by a few years and became the launching pad to the bevy of fighting games that were to come over the next decade. Chun-Li was my character of choice. Now, I would like to say that I choose her because she was a video game female that represented empowerment in a world were most video game females up to this point were usually only in the game to be rescued. Chun-Li in Street Fighter II was in many regards an ass kicking feminist, a character that would not fall brown to repeated giant lizard abductions and somebody young girls could choose should they become interested in beating the hell out of animated muscle men, men made of elastics and green electricity conducting monsters. Yes, I’d like to say I choose her because of her trailblazing for female video game characters but I’d be lying. I picked her because she was the easiest to control and once you got that windmill kick going you could clear an opponent in seconds. Well, that coupled with the fact that she had animated breasts. But, err, goooooo feminism! Later, when my brother and I moved out of the arcades and into our own console systems one of the first games we owned was Street Fighter II and I recall many thrown controllers and frustrated cursing when I continuously pummeled my brother using the windmill kick. Eventually there was a ban on me choosing Chun-Li, why I agreed I don’t know, and soon he was extracting his revenge. I’m drifting from the topic here. This post is not about the surmounting frustrations of early video gaming with my younger brother nor is it to relate to you the history or importance of Street Fighter II. This post is about “yatta”.

Yatta, a slang word in Japanese which could be translated to mean “I did it!”, “all right!”, “yay!” or “yippee!”, was something the Chun-Li character shouted after a swift leg lashing victory. Clutching her hands together she would jump up and down laughing like a giddy child and, extending her fingers into the popular peace sign adopted by Japanese females country wide as a necessary gesture when photographed, she would bellow out “YATTA!” My sister, who would watch my brother and I play and if we were in a giving mood maybe we’d give her a try so we could obliterate her in a matter of nanoseconds, latched onto the word first and would say it at random, usually when the situation didn’t merit a hearty “YATTA!” Duct tape wouldn’t stop her. Rope and rags would do nothing to mute her. She had sunk her teeth into this word like a Pittbull into some passerby’s lumpy ass and much like the dog she was not letting go. It became contagious, though, and my brother and I started saying it. Far from my sister, of course, we wouldn’t want her to think we were mimicking her now would we? It would fade out of our lexicon around the same time as “Cowabunga dude” and would be replaced by “FINISH HIM!” as animated fighting games became soaked with blood and gore. Oh, the sweet days of youth. I’d forget about “yatta” for nearly a decade until we were reacquainted on the internet thanks to some sweaty men wearing only fig leaves.

In 2001 Yatta was no longer a simple expression of elation. It was now a number six hit single! The song Yatta was recorded by the Leaf Squad (or Happatai), a comedy sextet of men wearing underwear sporting large fig leaves to cover up their possible shortcomings. The song obtained cult like status online when the video started appearing on various websites but Yatta really became a phenomenon with the release of an animated flash movie called Irrational Exuberance. Whereas the original video for yatta has the band members dancing very homoeroticly in their fig leaves, the animated version pokes fun at the lyrics, or what the creator interrupted to be the lyrics, and in a similar fashion to the All Your Base Are Belong To Us craze, the word Yatta was edited into popular products and logos. The video, named after Alan Greenspan’s description of the dot-com phenomenon , would become one of the most popular videos online. The creator of the video says “This is the reason I was famous. Fanimutation of kings, Irrational Exuberance took me thirty hours to make. In the bargain of the century, it will only take you four minutes to watch. Enjoy!” Fanumutation, or animutation, is a popular form of animation found online invented by Neil Cicierega in 2001. Such videos, normally made using Flash, are generally linked by using the same characters and themes as well as pop cultural images set to upbeat music. I first saw this video in college and had to hold in the laughter as it played out before me in the quiet computer room. And now that I am in Japan teaching kids I hear the word “yatta” shouted, as my sister once did, pretty much every day. The kids use it when they win games or guess the answer to a puzzle and I can’t help but laugh. When I was asked to include my favorite Japanese word on my class profile the choice was easy: Yatta!

Original Yatta:


Animated:


This country sure is weird.