How to Read Yakuza Zero’s Perplexing Pager Codes (Part 2)

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As promised, we’re back in 80’s Japan to clear up some unfinished business from last time: untangling the last few remaining pager codes. When we last left our heroes, Kiryū Kazuma and Majima Gorō, each one had just finished up every single side story in his area when his pager made a strange sound he’d never heard before.

The cause was a series of difficult-to-interpret pager messages from the a member of the mysterious Amon clan, challenging him to a fight. Amon Sō, the leader of the family, challenges Kiryū, and his son Jō challenges Majima. Both Amons send the exact same three messages, but Majima has a lot more trouble interpreting them than Kiryū does.

This article will assume you read the previous part or have a decently good grasp on goroawase, but for reference, here is the table from Part 1 again.

Code	Kango (Chinese)	Wago (Japanese)	English
0	rei	maru	zero, o, no
1	ichi	hito	wan, ai
2	ni	futa	tsū
3	san	mi	surī
4	shi	yon	fō
5	go	itsu	faibu
6	roku, ryū	mui	shikkusu
7	shichi	nana	sebun
8	hachi	ya	eito
9	ku, kyū	kokono	nain
10	jū	tō	ten

109-8-910

The intended message is 時は来た (toki wa kita), “the time has come”. Kiryū gets this right. This message uses a lot of vowel substitution, but, apart from that, there’s only one mildly tricky part. The message uses the topic marker particle, which is written using the hiragana normally pronounced ha (は), but it is, unintuitively, pronounced wa. The digit 8’s kango reading, hachi, is truncated to ha, and used to indicate the way the topic marker by the way it is written rather than the way it is pronounced.

Code	Interpretation	Reading	Truncation	Substitution	Final
10	wago	tō	to		to
9	kango	ku		ki	ki
–	Separator
8	kango	hachi	ha	wa	wa
–	Separator
9	kango	ku		ki	ki
10	wago	tō	to	ta	ta

Majima completely misinterprets the message, and reads it as 投球は９投 (tōkyū wa kyū tō), which means “as for pitching, nine throws”. He interprets this to mean a pitcher in a baseball game managed to make three batters strike out in just nine pitches, and is impressed by the feat. In his interpretation, Majima does something rather straightforward that is nonetheless not seen in any other pager code in Yakuza 0 (apart from phone numbers). He looks at the second 9 and takes it to literally mean 9 instead of assuming it’s just being used for its reading like usual.

Note, though, that Majima’s interpretation of the message isn’t invalid. His reading obeys all the rules of goroawase. In fact, you could argue it’s a better reading, as it involves much less creative interpretation. The only real problem with it is that there’s no reason for Majima to think someone would page him about a baseball game with zero context.

Still, Amon’s message is pushing goroawase to its limits, so it’s hard to blame Majima. With so many different possible readings crammed into each digit, if you’re going to stray too far outside of well-trodden ground, it’s hard to be confident your recipient will untangle it properly!

Code	Interpretation	Reading	Truncation	Substitution	Final
10	wago	tō			tō
9	kango	kyū			kyū
–	Separator
8	kango	hachi	ha	wa	wa
–	Separator
9	Literal	9			9
10	wago	tō			tō

10-940-51

The intended message is 闘牛場来い (tōgyūjō koi), “come to the bullfighting arena”. This message, again, does something we haven’t seen before. In previous examples, whenever a syllable’s vowel is substituted, there is no hint of what it should be changed to. Maybe the senders felt using another digit to explicitly indicate the vowel would be unnecessary, or perhaps even be more confusing than helpful. Or, maybe, they just ran out of space.

Amon, on the other hand, decides explicitly indicating the substituted vowel is warranted in this message, so he writes じょう (jō) as 40-, using the 4 to indicate the consonant (with an implied dakuten), the 0 to indicate the vowel that should be substituted, and the hyphen to lengthen that vowel. “Bullfighting arena” isn’t exactly a phrase you hear everyday, especially in Japan, so it makes sense to take care to encode it more explicitly.

Code	Interpretation	Reading	Truncation	Substitution	Final
10	wago	tō	to		tō
–	Separator
9	kango	kyū		gyū	gyū
4	kango	shi	sh	j	j
0	English	o			o
–	Lengthener	ー			o
5	kango	go		ko	ko
1	kango	ichi	i		i

Majima guesses all the right readings, and even correctly interprets 40- as jō, but doesn’t think to add a dakuten to turn kyū into gyū, as he is still thinking about baseball from his misreading of the first message. So, he arrives at 投球場来い (tōkyū jō koi), “come to the pitching place”, instead. He interprets “pitching place” as a bullpen, a place where relief pitchers warm up before being swapped into a baseball game.

Code	Interpretation	Reading	Truncation	Substitution	Final
10	wago	tō	to		tō
–	Separator
9	kango	kyū			kyū
4	kango	shi	sh	j	j
0	English	o			o
–	Lengthener	ー			o
5	kango	go		ko	ko
1	kango	ichi	i		i

160-0

Despite its brevity, the last message is the most perplexing, as, for the first time, even Kiryū misunderstands it. This is not too surprising, as it is the sender’s signature, 亜門 (Amon), and neither protagonist has ever met the sender or heard his name before. There are many creative ways to rephrase things to make them easier to encode into goroawase, but it’s pretty hard to rephrase a name. So, Amon just kind of had to bite the bullet and do his best to encode a word that goroawase just isn’t suited for, using nearly every trick at his disposal!

The number 1 is being used for its resemblance to the English letter I, whose name is pronounced アイ (ai) in Japanese, which is then truncated to a. Next, as in the previous message, we see explicit vowel substitution at work: the two digits 60 are being used together to indicate the single syllable mo. Then, a separating hyphen.

The last digit is the most mysterious. In some way, the final 0 is being used to encode an ん (n) kana. As I mentioned in the last article, the n kana is usually implicit in goroawase, but as the recipients have never met Amon before, there’s just no way for them to infer it here. So, even though it isn’t standard to encode the n kana explicitly, Amon decides it’s necessary to do so here, and arrives at 0 as the best way to do that. In researching this article, Anthony and I were able to come up with a few theories for why this encoding would be used, but nothing conclusive.

The best theory I’ve come up with is that 0 is being read as の (no), using the logic that if you have 0 apples, you have no apples. Then, no is truncated to n. This idea that 0 can be read no is backed up by this source, which provides a complete set of mappings for every kana except for n. The source even lists Mahjong readings like 6 as ryū as seen in the last article, and uses vowel substitution instead of gojūonjun for unassigned kana like the rest of the messages we’ve seen in Yakuza 0.

The most dubious part is truncating no to n, as we’ve never seen truncation remove a vowel that was not explicitly substituted before. Removing a vowel from a kana requires thinking about it like a Westerner, as its component rōmaji. As an alternative explanation, the explanatory particle no is often shortened to just n in informal speech. Either way, I have an easier time swallowing this than the anachronism keitai presents.

Code	Interpretation	Reading	Truncation	Final
1	English	ai	a	a
6	wago	mui	m	m
0	English	o		o
–	Separator
0	English	no	n	n

In the Western release, Kiryū says, “‘Am’ and ‘on,’ maybe? I don’t get it.” Even though he interpreted it correctly, he’s still clueless, because he has no idea who Amon is. This is a localization change, though—in Japanese, he reads it as あい・むおーん (ai muōn), which is total nonsense. His remark in Japanese reflects his greater confusion: さっぱり意味がわからねぇ…… (sappari imi ga wakaranē, “I don’t understand the meaning at all”). While he guessed all the right readings, including somehow correctly interpreting 0 as n, he didn’t go far enough with truncation, and he read the hyphen as a lengthener instead of a separator.

Code	Interpretation	Reading	Truncation	Final
1	English	ai		ai
6	wago	mui	mu	mu
0	English	o		o
–	Lengthener	ー		o
0	English	no	n	n

Majima, on the other hand, did a lot better on this one! He got the first part of the message completely right, only misreading the hyphen as a lengthener and missing the unusual encoding of n as 0 at the very end. Assuming it’s the kango reading, rei, he comes up with アモーレ (amōre, amore), the Italian word meaning “love”.

Code	Interpretation	Reading	Truncation	Final
1	English	ai	a	a
6	wago	mui	m	m
0	English	o		o
–	Lengthener	ー		o
0	kango	rei	re	re

Majima’s Logic

Having completely misunderstood all three messages, Majima concludes that it’s some sort of code (yes, coded even more than goroawase already is) sent to him as part of some conspiracy to destroy Sōtenbori, and thinks hard to untangle it. Having come up with “bullpen” and “amore,” he makes a logical leap that would make Black Dynamite proud: since the Italian and Spanish languages are closely related, and bullfighting is a Spanish tradition, the sender must want him to come to the bullfighting arena. So, by complete chance, Majima ends up going to the right place.

This contrivance relies on what seems like an English-specific wordplay, that “bullpen” refers to a place where pitchers warm up and also a literal pen where bulls are kept. It might seem like a particularly clever rewrite on the part of the localization, but it was almost exactly the same in Japanese, using the English loanword ブルペン (burupen, bullpen.)

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations on defeating Yakuza 0‘s secret optional goroawase superboss! Goroawase is all over Japanese culture and media, and due to being virtually untranslatable, localizations pretty much have to change it or work around it, so it’s a topic we’re likely to return to again and again. Yakuza 0 stands out as only game I know of where characters make serious attempts to communicate to each other via goroawase, due to its setting, and the localization leaves it completely unchanged and unexplained. So, it’s very unlikely any future articles on this topic will be as complicated as this one, and you’re well-prepared to understand any that we write!

Have you seen any other Japanese media with numerical wordplay you were curious about, or just found cool? Let us know in the comments below, or via social media! To make sure you don’t miss new articles, you can follow us on Twitter, Reddit, or RSS! For another misunderstanding involving cows, check out this article explaining why a Xenogears character confused “photon” for “calf”. Or, for another jarring cultural difference, learn why a Harvest Moon character was offended at being told she was good at wrestling.