Last February while making the rounds on the Monuments Men promotional tour, Bill Murray and some of his castmates went on The Graham Norton Show. While there, Murray talked about a Japanese phrase book called Making Out in Japanese that he had used while in Japan filming Lost in Translation.
One of his favorite phrases? The Japanese version of “Who do you think you’re talking to?” According to Murray, that is “a Yakuza thing, which means now you’re going to die.” On Norton’s show, Murray talked about using the phrase to scare off a hotel guest who had been bothered by his singing, but in the above video from the set of Lost in Translation, we see Murray putting his assisted mastery of Japanese to use while teasing members of the crew with that same phrase that is inexplicably in a book about macking on folks.
In case you’re wondering, yes, Making Out in Japanese is available on Amazon. It’s a revised edition of the book that was released in 2003, and no, Bill Murray did not write the foreword, though it seems like he’s given the book enough exposure over the years that you gotta figure he deserves a nickel off of every dollar. Not that he needs the money, but it’s also not like he’s got that big Ghostbusters 3 golden parachute lingering in the distance anymore either and minor league baseball teams aren’t going to buy themselves.
Source: YouTube
