Yabari

I just wrote this post, but it's mostly explanatory griping about a classmate, and I'm not really comfortable complaining this extensively about anybody but me. Anyway, it's getting put in the archives at the end of first semester. I'll link to it from the post I'm writing today and actually putting where it ought to go.

Now, none of you know Yabari, and for that you can only be grateful. It's mean, I know, but he fought with everybody, including the teachers, looked down on all of us, and generally monopolized class time. A great example of one of his genius discourses was his half-hour explanation to us "less-studied peoples" on how Mercury is not only not hot, but the coldest planet overall, in our solar system.
He also cheated blatantly on about half of our tests.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's go back to his question to me, simplified here because five minutes of back-and-forth arguing is no fun to type out or read:

「むし。。。何でじゅうを守るための、じゅうがひつようですか。」
mushi... nande juu wo mamoru tame no, juu ga hitsuyou desu ka.
"Insect... Why are guns necessary to protect guns?"

Now, I was totally expecting some kind of simple question like "What's your favorite color?" or "Why did you start studying Japanese?" or "What's the answer to life, the universe, and everything?" but no, those would all make too much sense. Instead, he starts off with a charged political question that requires difficult words to talk about at all, much less try to justify.

Here's what he was trying to ask: "Why are guns necessary? Further, if they necessary to protect individual freedom, why is that?"
Or rather, that's what we figured out he was trying to ask, after five minutes of him telling us and the native-born, highly educated teacher, that juu means "freedom" and that we were all simply wrong. Between the second-language barrier and the Yabari barrier, you saw what it came out as.

I'd like to point out that I caught a lot of flak for being one of his strongest supporters in the school, so my opinion here is likely biased in his favor more than you will find from other people. He was pretty nice in general, but he was really frustrating in class. His nicknames from other people in the class include, but are not limited to Yabai-san ("Mr. Awful", chosen for its phonetic closeness to his real name) and "The mushi guy", a reference to his common mispronunciation of the two-syllable word moshi.