My Friend and Her Pretty Shiner

I was just correcting the second-year Eigo Hyogen (English Expressions) tests and came across something kind of funny. Here's an excerpt from a section where the kids were supposed to write about a good friend:

My Friend
My friend is a girl.
She has a black eye.
She has a long hair.
Hair color is black.
She playing the piano very well.
I often listen to the sound.
It was very sweet and deeply.
She is very kind.
I am very happy.
Because I have a good friend.

Kindly refer to the sentence in red, above. Without having lived in Japan, you might stop for a second and say... "um, what? What happened to the girl with the black eye?" but I've corrected so many journals now that it takes less than a second to know that this student is referring to her friend's eye color (most Japanese people say they have black-colored eyes).

I showed this to the teacher next to me, asking her to write the actual translation for a real black eye (in Japanese) next to my explanation/correction, and we started talking about black eyes.

First of all, I guess this very girl actually did have a black eye last year. Her parents gave it to her when she was "fresh"... I'm not going to get started on that issue, but yeah.

Secondly, however, I learned that there are many songs about black eyes in Japan as they are considered very beautiful (black eyes actually means beautiful eyes... apparently). Many poem also include black eyes in the title.

I personally am a little on the minority side with the green eyes (although I did have two shiners in high school - one swimming accident and both eyes when I had surgery senior year), but there's actually so many shades of brown eyes among the "black eyes"... it's sort of fun to learn about another fold in the different concepts of beauty between our cultures.