As teenagers in '80s Japan, my brothers were obsessive readers of a manga comic strip called "Be-Bop High School." It featured a gang of delinquents at a public school who picked fights and skipped class a lot. You knew they were bad kids because they squatted on street corners, shaved their eyebrows, and wore really baggy school uniforms.

And bad kids, of course, say bad words. The language in this manga was so dirty that it made used sumo thongs look clean. In one strip, a punch-permed toughie glares into the eyes of another and calls him -- gasp! -- a "stupid octopus."

O.K., so it sounds lame in English. Any linguist will tell you curse words don't translate; an expletive in one language is an innocent adjective in another. So maybe it's only natural that, to a foreigner, Japanese trash talk is about as threatening as Hello Kitty. But trust me on this: In Japan, you're cruising for a bruising when you compare someone to an eight-legged cephalopod mollusk.

Never mind insulting someone else; in the land of hara-kiri, it's even more devastating when you use such language to insult yourself. In one of our favorite TV dramas, "Stewardess Story," the main character was so pathetic that she repeatedly failed the flight attendant course. At the climax of every episode, she'd wail in despair: "I am a dumb, lazy turtle!"

"No!" my sister and I would sob. "Don't say that!"

But swearing in Japanese lost its thrill once we learned to curse in English. My siblings and I acquired our vocabulary of American profanities from -- where else? -- the movies. Back then, the only English-language films that made it to Japanese theaters were Hollywood blockbusters, which meant we had no choice but to fill our appetites with whatever schlock Sylvester Stallone paid his hormone bills with that month. It also meant we gorged ourselves on testosterone-pumped language.

But no matter how macho the insult, the Japanese subtitle would castrate it. When a bad guy screamed "a--hole!" at Sly, for example, in Japanese he was calling him "bugger-snot!" ... which even we knew wasn't at all the same thing. Still, it goes both ways. "Hole in the bottom" is as ridiculous an epithet in Japanese as "octopus" is in English.

Our potty-mouths established in two languages, my siblings and I soon discovered a source of great hilarity: teaching American relatives Japanese curse words, and vice versa. To this day, our American cousins don't know how to greet us in Japanese, but they all know three words for poo.

Bridging the gaps between cultures is so important. We're just glad to do our part.