Just shine full-strength sunlight into every single cell of your body and you’ll never need to worry about viruses again.
馬鹿と暗闇おっかない
(Baka to kurayami okkanai; “Both idiots and darkness are scary”)
Definition:
The darkness is frightening because you don’t know who or what may be there or what may happen; you can’t see the dangers and therefore need to be especially on guard.
With an idiot, even if you have a good idea of their general modus operandi, motivations, and so on, there’s always a chance that they’ll latch on to some completely senseless idea without warning and cause unnecessary trouble. You can never quite know what they’ll do or say or what harm they may cause, and therefore need to be especially on guard. In other words, idiots are just as frightening as the darkness itself, and for similar reasons.
Breakdown:
We begin with noun 馬鹿 (baka), “fool,” “idiot,” and the noun 暗闇 (kurayami), “darkness,” joined by the particle と (to, like “toe”), here acting as “and.” Any further particles are elided, but we may assume that this noun phrase is a topic, and that the comment on this topic is おっかない (okkanai), a Tokyo-dialect colloquialism for “scary.”
Notes:
A related phrase replaces darkness with a bee/wasp nest (蜂の巣 = hachi no su, where hachi is a classification that combines both wasps and bees) and warns you not to touch it (手を出すな = te wo dasu na).
おっかない is an interesting term. Its etymology is not entirely clear, but it seems to have spread through eastern and northern Japan from the “Shitamachi” part of Edo (= Tokyo), and the leading theory is that it’s a slurred derivative of classical adjective おほけなし, “beyond one’s means,” “discourteous,” or even “awe-inspiring.” These days it seems not to be in common usage and has taken on a childish tone, perhaps by association with other verbal distortions found in Japanese baby talk.
Example sentence:
「まったく、げん君ってばさっきアルミホイルで包んだじゃが芋をチンするところだった、馬鹿と暗闇おっかないな」
(“Mattaku, Gen-kun tteba sakki arumihoiru de tsutsunda jagaimo wo chin suru tokoro datta, baka to kurayami okkanai na.”)
[“Sheesh, just now Gen was about to nuke a potato wrapped in aluminum foil. Idiots and darkness are full of dangerous unknowns.”]
Fair of skin, unfair of… other things
色の白いは七難隠す
(Iro no shiroi wa shichinan kakusu; “White skin hides many flaws.”)
Definition:
There’s all sorts of baggage here! This kotowaza is literally saying that if a woman’s skin is sufficiently pale, then that alone makes her so beautiful that even a variety of physical flaws can’t detract from her looks. I believe that this comes from the value ascribed to a secluded, indoors aristocratic lifestyle rather than imported European norms, but it’s still kind of iffy by today’s standards.
Breakdown:
We begin at the end with the verb 隠す (kakusu), “to conceal [something],” in conclusive form. Although the expected object-marker particle is elided, this verb takes as its object the number-noun 七難 (shichinan), “seven difficulties” – that is, “a variety of faults.” It turns out that this mini-sentence is itself a comment on a topic marked by the particle は (wa). The topic itself is a noun phrase centered on the noun 色 (iro), “color,” linked by the associative particle の (no) to adjective 白い (shiroi), which appears in… conclusive form?
This one is a little odd. The most likely explanation is that the adjective is actually in prenominal form, and what it modifies is an elided こと (koto), “[abstract] thing.” So 色の白い essentially becomes “whiteness.”
Notes:
Keep in mind that for some other phrases, 難 becomes shorthand for more severe problems, including natural disasters, so the saying does not assert that white skin can cover for natural disasters or the like… somewhat ironically, in retrospect and from half a world away.
One variant saying replaces whiteness of skin with length of hair (髪の長い, kami no nagai) as the positive quality that drowns out lesser flaws. Another related saying doubles down on the color: 米の飯と女は白いほど良い (kome no meshi to onna wa shiroi hodo yoi), “cooked rice and women are as good as they are white” – apparently a saying from before people realized that a white-rice diet leads to thiamin deficiency.
Example sentence:
「色の白いは七難隠すというけれども、この娘がしゃべり始めると隠すことのできない性格の悪さが露わになる」
(“Iro no shiroi wa shichinan kakusu to iu keredomo, kono musume ga shaberi hajimeru to kakusu koto no dekinai seikaku no warusa ga arawa ni naru.”)
[“It’s said that white skin conceals a multitude of flaws, but when this girl starts talking it reveals a flaw in her character that can’t be hidden.”]