What’s in a Title: Detective Conan

米花商店街ダストミストリー

米花（べいか）

This is just the name of the city 米花町（べいかちょう）. However, I still want to shed some light on the kanji involved in making up the city’s name. 

The kanji 米 can mean “rice” and it also comes from another name for America 米国. I find it funny that America is literally called rice country in this context. 

The kanji 花 can mean flower, like はな. It also has another kanji reading か which can come from 花瓶 かびん (flower vase). 

The manga artist who makes Detective Conan, Gosha Aoyama, likes word-play and since this revolves around mystery, the name comes from Baker Street. ベイカー 丁（ちょう）＝＞Baker Street. If you are familiar with Sherlock Holmes then you will know that is the same street the famous detective resides.  

Long story short this means “Beika City”.

商店街（しょうてんがい）

The first kanji 商 can mean selling, merchant. The second kanji 店 means a store or a shop. The last kanji 街 means something like a town or street. Together they make up the vocabulary word “shopping district”.

ダスト（出すと？）

This one was a read head scratcher but when I searched the word on bing this is what popped up.

Still had my doubts so I searched on weblio.jp (has a Japanese dictionary). It can obviously mean dust but in this context it wouldn’t sound right. So the next word that makes sense would be trash or garbage. So from the picture and this vocabulary word together we have “garbage bin”. 

At first I thought the the katakana this word might come from 出すと. The word 出す can mean to throw out something. I just don’t know where the と comes from. But by doing further research, it is short for a wasei-eigo word ダストボックス or dust box. Wasei-eigo are words that come from English but may take on a different meaning in Japan.

ミストリー

And to top it all off we have a relatively easy katakana word derived from English. This word just means “mystery”.

So together we have “Beika City Shopping District Garbage Bin Mystery”.

Looks like I was close enough, according to Crunchyroll.

This episode was interesting. Detective Conan has some interesting titles, huh? This episode title comes from the 1002nd episode.

I remember the excitement when I got to finally watch this episode. It was originally scheduled for 2020, but was postponed. Nice lead up to the movie which is supposed to tie in with the olympics. It did fantastic in the theaters. Just wish I could watch it. It has the same OP (by Mai Kuraki ・倉木 麻衣) who has done a ton of songs for Detective Conan) but with a new sequence. They even threw in a blast to the past reference to the first ending.

Find it somewhat funny that they can’t mention the Olympics. WSG World Sports Games. And the symbol they use for it. But hey, I get it, if you want to mention something big like the Olympics in stuff like this it will cost money. 

The episode had many things going on. For instance at Ran’s high school they had to come up with an idea for the tourists coming to Tokyo. The best ideas would be selected and put into action by the school. Ran came up with a bag that tourists can put their trash in. It was a nice idea on Ran’s part. Since there were going to be more people going to Tokyo for the Olympics, I wondered what they would do to keep order in Tokyo while it was going on. 

花屋さんは大変になったようだね。ちょっと天然ボケですよね。やはり、真犯人は猫だ。おっさんは「目がいい」と言いますか？冗談ですよね。おっさんはメガネをかけても（笑）。