As many of you know, I ride a Suzuki Burgman 650 motorscooter. In Japan the Burgman line are called “Skywave” (which I think is an appropriate name for such technologically advanced machines), but the marketing folk at Suzuki for some reason call them “Burgman” in Europe and the Americas.

A member of the Burgman owners’ forum that I belong to commented that since “Burg” means “Castle” in German (in fact, Burgmann — with 2 ens — is a German surname meaning “man of the castle” or “man of the city”), he was going to call his Burgman “Shirojin.”

I don’t know if such a word already exists in Japanese, but it has a nice ring to it!