What Does "Myachi" Mean?

by Crazy Ivan

File this under the increasingly long list of great questions that I wish I had simple answers for.  Well, I suppose in this case I actually do have a simple answer, but it stinks.  I have several complicated answers as well and they're all better, so let's take them in order.

Q: What Does "Myachi" Mean?
A: Nothing.  Myachi Man made it up.


This is the simple answer and it's also true.  As near as we can tell, the word has never had any meaning whatsoever, though it does show up on a lot of Japanese Twitter accounts, so maybe we'll find out different later.

But the truth is that Myachi Man made up the word, liked the way it sounded and it stuck.  So much so, in fact, that we now call the dude Myachi Man.

Now let's get on with some of the more fun and less accurate answers:

Q: What Does "Myachi" Mean?
A: It's Japanese for Awesome Toy.


Alright, so this isn't remotely true.  I'm not sure what the Japanese word for "awesome toy" is or if there even is a Japanese word for "awesome toy", but if there is, it's not Myachi.  Myachi kind of sounds Japanese and most people assume that it is, but as I just admitted, it's a made up monicker that Myachi Man dug.

But that's not to say it's purely an accident that the word sounds Japanese.  At the time that Myachi Man first started marketing this thing (1997), everything that was popular was Japanese.  Japanese culture was taking over and if people saw the name and erroneously assumed that it was a hit toy from Japan that just made it to the US, that sure didn't hurt sales.

This has given rise to an oft cited story that may not be entirely correct:

Q: What Does "Myachi" Mean?
A: It's a combination between Mr. Miyagi and Tai Chi


A lot of people believe this to be true and it may very well be.  Myachi Man has never actually confirmed this myth but it's so ubiquitous that many Myachi Masters believe it to be true.  The connection between Mr. Miyagi and Myachi is pretty obvious to anyone who has both seen the original Karate Kid (everyone born before 1984 but after 1968) and seen the Myachi Move, the Cold Fusion (everyone reading this blog).

In the movie, Mr. Miyagi teaches Daniel how to do karate by (spoiler alert!) making him wax cars.  The circular "Wax On, Wax Off" motion from the movie is really similar to the movements for the Cold Fusion.  Well, actually if you wanna get all geeky-technical about it (and I do), the Cold Fusion is more like "Sand the Floor" and the Refusion is "Wax On, Wax Off", but that's beside the point.

The truth may never be known for certain.  It is true that Myachi Man is a fan of the Karate Kid and that he recognized the connection between Myachi and martial arts right away, so that might well have been the inspiration behind the name.

But there is a more practical answer that probably has some truth to it as well:

Q: What Does "Myachi" Mean?
A: It means all the real words were taken.


Even in the ancient dial up days of the nineties Myachi Man knew that if he was going to make this work he was going to have to have a website to hold it all together.  Back then there wasn't even a You-Tube to fall back on so the only way to put Myachi videos online was through our site.

But of course, by then all the real words and normal sounding fake words were gobbled up by greedy domain name hogs.  That's why all the websites now have weird, meaningless names like Google, Yahoo, Youtube, Twitter and myachi.com.

Now, that more or less gets you through all the real reasons why we call a Myachi a Myachi, but there's one more reason that I want to throw at you as well.  This one is definitely not true, but it's kind of cool anyway:

Q: What Does "Myachi" Mean?
A: It's an acronym.


Back in the summer of 2006, Animal and I were stationed in Orlando, living in the Myachi Mobile together and knew nobody in the area.  This was also the summer we invented the games of Myachi Fu and Carpet Bombing.  Believe me, those two sentences are related.

So desperate were we to fill the time in our off hours that one day Animal suggested that we come up with an acronym for Myachi.  Under other circumstances we might have given up on that five minutes in, but given the environment we made a two day conversation out of it.  What we finally came up with was pretty cool, in my (kind of) humble opinion:

May You Always Catch Hands Inverted...

Kind of has a "May the force be with you" feel to it, doesn't it?