Dondake?!

What is "dondake?!" What does it mean? It's a damn good question, and one that I still haven't quite put my finger on.

Here's what I've surmised thus far: There's this Japanese television personality named Ikko who pops up on variety shows now and then. Ikko is an okama, a Japanese drag queen, and about every ten seconds or so she wags her finger and snaps and exclaims "dondake?!" If this all sounds terribly strange and unfunny to you, it's because, well...it is. But "dondake?!" is a tour-de-force in the way that "Who Let the Dogs Out" stormed through the US, and as such it's intrigue is at least worth a short study.

"Dondake," it appears, is not a Japanese word. Nor is it a likely candidate for catch phrase of the year. However, the word originally bred from the Shinjuku 2-Chrome gay scene has caught fire in the past six months and has become nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. What this means, naturally, is that my students - inspired by the effeminate Ikko (think Perez Hilton with his own television show) - have taken every chance to bombard me with calls of "Dondake?!" since my arrival. What began as something perplexing and unfunny is now simply, well, unfunny.

So what does it mean? Essentially, the phrase seems to boil down to the Japanese equivalent of "WTF?" (or "who cares," or "whatever," or something entirely different depending on who you ask) but after investigation, I'm not sure the meaning is the important part. I sat down to write an entry intended to rail against the sheer stupidity of "dondake?!," but upon review what's come out is, at the very least, an acknowledgment of the staying power of a catch phrase.

I may not understand it, but what the hell. Dondake?!