More likely when the person at the center is rotten

朝蠅暮蚊
chou.you.bo.bun

Literally: morning – fly (the insect, not the verb) – evening – mosquito

Alternately: A troublesome situation or gloomy atmosphere caused by an assemblage of narrow-minded, trivial people. Like being surrounded by clouds of flies in the morning and clouds of mosquitoes in the evening.

Notes: This delightfully insulting image comes to us from the collected poems of Han Yu (韓愈, in Japanese Kan Yu), whom we’ve seen before.

The “fly” character can be written as 蠅 (old form) or 蝿 (new) without any especial difference.

ChouYouKaRen

Found in the title of episode 34 of an obscure anime about… delinquent teenage girls with psychic powers?

About Confanity

I love the written word more than anything else I've had the chance to work with. I'm back in the States from Japan for grad school, but still studying Japanese with the hope of becoming a translator -- or writer, or even teacher -- as long as it's something language-related.
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