Today, I was talking with someone in Japanese. We were talking about manga and at some point we started talking about Jujutsu Kaisen. He asked me what I thought about “呪物” and, as I didn’t know that word I looked it up in a dictionary. The thing is it was translated to “fetish” that word didn’t make sense at all, he managed to tell me he was talking about cursed objects. How come I couldn’t find that word? I looked on Jisho & Imiwa. Also my japanese level isn’t very high (~N3).
2 comments
The word “fetish” has more than 1 meaning in English, and one is indeed “object worshipped for its supposed magical powers”. (Why, what were *you* thinking?? 😉 )
There is a limit to JP<->EN dictionaries and there is an even tighter limit to “single word” definitions like the one here. If a definition is missing, ambiguous, or makes no sense, you can always check a monolinugal dictionary, e.g. [https://www.weblio.jp/content/%E5%91%AA%E7%89%A9](https://www.weblio.jp/content/%E5%91%AA%E7%89%A9)
The English word fetish originally had the definition: “An object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers, especially such an object associated with animistic or shamanistic religious practices.”
Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.