April 04, 2004

• my assumption has always been that it meant "father" or something similar, and that the chair style was named as such because it's large and sort of holds you, the way a parent would. if you google papasan and father together you will get a lot of pages that are about people's dads... just google papasan and you get a lot of chair sites and a poem about an old vietnamese man.
• uhm, i always thought it was just the chair but if you google papasan & furniture you get results for items other than just the chairs, like tables and loveseats, labelled "papasan furniture"... still that doesn't definitively answer your question, since it may just be a marketting ploy, to get you to buy more wicker, and not an actual cultural definition.. i still think it's just the style of chair. never argue about the price of a rebuilt alternator with your mechanic while reading mofi, 'cause you'll invariably misread people's queries :-]
• I too always thought that is described the specific chair but to be honest, I have no basis for that. As t r a c y said, Google seems to go the other way but I've never heard people refering to other wicker furniture as papasan... so it could just be a way of attracting internet traffic. Sorry I'm no help
• LOL. My first reaction was - papasan is the male equivalent of a mamasan. I know, I know. I'm no help either.
• My understanding is that futons (the couch kind with a frame and all) and papasans are Japanese influenced American inventions. "Papa" is used in Japanese meaning "father", and the honorific "san" is sometimes added. My guess is that whoever developed the papasan chair considered it to be along the same lines as a recliner, or other big chairs popular among American papas, and wanted to give it a Japanese sounding name that would be understandable to westerners as meaning "father's chair." Keep in mind that my Google-fu has failed me miserably on this one, so I am of course talking completely out of my ass. And Alnedra, "papa-san" would be the male equivalent of "mama-san", just not in this context.
• mexican: yeah, I know *grin* But "papa" is not Japanese for father. It's English for father (or even French). The Japanese call their dads either "chichi", "oyaji" (although that's more "old man" than it is "dad") or "tou-san". However, the Japanese do acknowledge the term "Papa" as a Western term for "father" (I recall there's some Japanese bakery that uses "Papa" something-or-other as their store name), and so you may be on the right track here, as a term to denote that "Westerner's dads use this kind of chair to sit on". If that makes sense at all.
• Funny - papasans have always seemed very feminine chairs to me, for curling up in with a book, some tea and a cat. I'm afraid I'm not much help for the definition, though I have only heard the word used for a specific kind of bowl chair. I think the bowl also has to be separate, or else it's not a real papasan. Because if the bowl is separate, you can put it straight up and have a real nest to curl in. I really want one....
• I lived in Japan for a while and picked up a small bit of the language while there. Any old man who was "fatherly" was called Papasan - it's simply used as a term of endearment. Interesting that the chair would be called a Papasan, as even a young-un such as myself finds it slightly difficult to get out of one, even though they are incredibly comfy. This is just a guess, but I wonder if perhaps it had something to do with the craftsman who was making the chairs - that they were "papasans" and therefore the chair became a "papasan"?
• Alnedra, Senseido seems to think that papa is Japanese. Both mama and papa are in common use in Japan. And TTNoelle, I'm fairly certain that papasan chairs are not Japanese in origin. Also, oji-san or ojii-san are the terms usually used for the type of old man you are referring to. I've only heard Papa-san used by Japanese people when they're trying to describe an oji-san to a foreigner.
• This is probably the bakery Alnedra is talking about.
• I stand corrected. Perhaps I should say that "papa" is not Japanese in origin. Japanese does borrow a lot of terms from English. There's a Japanese school near where I work, and we get alot of Japanese expatriates shopping at the supermarket I go to. Usually those peachy-cheeked kids will be yelling for their "O-tou-san" or "O-kaa-san" rather than "papa" or "mama". It's only anecdotal, I know. They're adorable, and helluva better behaved than the local kids.
• I don't know how much this had an effect on the name of the chair, but if you look at the historical linguistics of Japanese, "san" also had another meaning of "cut down." If this was taken into account, maybe it referred to the rattan used to make the chairs?
• Whoa, you're digging into the archives there. Welcome!
• Interesting point, devushka. Welcome indeed!