gme.jp

No diplomacy, please

I was driving past the Chinese Embassy this evening when the word 外交 caught my eye on a sign outside an apartment block, perhaps because we were right next to the embassy. Then I read the whole phrase and saw that it said 物品販売外交お断り. For a half moment I toyed with the interpretation of 'no peddling or diplomacy'--you never know, with their proximity to the embassy perhaps the Chinese kept coming around trying to get them to act as a backchannel through which to sort the whole Yasukuni thing out, for example--but then I clicked back to reality and remembered that the mental topography of 外交 in Japanese extends to the particularly financial-industry sense of going marketing to outside clients; hence, the sign was saying 'no hawking (of things either tangible or intangible), please'. Neither clothespegs nor life insurance.

I hope this doesn't sound like showing off; it just seemed interesting to me in terms of the differently-shaped headspace that diplomacy and 外交 occupy.