The not-Minecraft-official axolotl from Village Vanguard is sewn with very delicate thread that keeps coming apart. I've had to condict emergency surgery to suture her seams five times already in the last half year.
So, I've been studying Japanese for over 15 years, and I've been a professional translator for over 5, but it's crazy how much there always is to keep learning, especially about a language you didn't grow up with. There are a lot of things I know that might be obscure to some native speakers, and things that would be obvious even to a child that I'm just now learning. Either way, it's really fun having those moments where something falls into place.
This all to say that, thanks to a book I'm working on right now, I was today years old when I finally understood the etymology of the Pokemon name "Wooper" 😂
i just learned a Japanese thing that i thought you would appreciate! one of my study buddies found out that axolotls have a funny common name in Japanese: ウーパールーパー (pronounced like "oo-pa-ru-pa"), which made us all go "wait like... oompa loompa??" so one of my friends did some investigating, haha, and found this article on it (deepl does an ok job with the translation if you are curious and want to read it)
basically: it comes from this 1985 commercial for instant yakisoba in a cup (i have no idea if the commercial was at all inspired by oompa loompas)
something kind of funny, though, is that when i ran the text through deepl while making this post, i noticed that deepl could not for the life of it figure out the word "ウーパールーパー" lol and it kept translating it as "Whooper", and then i was like "...wait a minute"
sure enough, the Japanese name for wooper is apparently "ウパー" ("oo-pa")! Japanese doesn't really distinguish between a "wu" and an "u" sound, and both of them are written with ウ in katakana, so wooper's name probably came from ウーパールーパー!