What do you call your father or mother in Japanese? I’ve been playing a lot of Xchange 2 lately and the character Kyoko refers to her father as ‘otosan’. Now in all the Japanese courses I’ve taken over the years, the teachers go to great lenghts to distingush between the forms you use to describe the members of your own family as opposed to those of others. For example, your friend’s father is ‘otoosan’, but you would refer to your own father as ‘chichi.’ Likewise, your girlfriend’s mother is ‘okaasan’, but your own dear mother is ‘haha’. And on and on it goes down the family line. There’s a dauntingly long list of terms you have to know to distingush your own family members from those of others. Compounding the problem is that the words ‘oniisan’ and ‘oneesan’, which mean ‘older brother’ and ‘older sister’ respectively can also be used to refer to any young man or woman at all. Thus we have the manga/anime ‘Otenki Oneesan’ or “Weather Woman” in English. But, in all my years of reading manga or watching anime or Japanese movies I have never heard the informal words ‘chichi’ or ‘haha’ used. It’s always ‘otoosan’ or ‘okaasan’. Likewise, no one ever refer to their brothers or sisters as ‘onii’ or ‘onee’. It’s always "oniisan’ or ‘oneesan’. Sometimes a girl in a bishojo game might refer to her brother as ‘onii-chan,’ but that usually when she’s having sex with him. So, can anybody give me some insight here? Are words like ‘chichi’ and ‘haha’ every used in reality. Or are they just never used in anime? Or are our Japanese teachers leading us astray?
Also, in Xchange 2 theres a scene where that little worm Shou asks Takuya to identify the title of the first game published by Crowd (sort of an in-joke, I guess). The answer is something like ‘Chasing the High School Uniform.’ In another part of the game there’s a teacher, Sano-sensei, whose career is under a cloud for doing just that. Does anyone know, could he be a re-cycled character from that earlier game