Usually, when お疲れ様です (o-tsukaresama desu) rolls off the Japanese tongue, it can be safely understood as “Thank you for your hard work.”

The “o” part means that this applies to someone else. The “tsukare” part is a direct reference to fatigue.

The “sama” part… in kanji, this is the same “sama” that is used as an honorific, but there is another, highly relevant reading here. This kanji is used in words and idioms relating to situations. Or rather, what something seems to be.

Example:

様子 (yousu) = appearance

様式 (youshiki) = pattern

様相 (yousou) = aspect

It is in this sense that 様 marks that someone else (because of the “o” honorific) seems to be tired.

The “desu” is simply a copula adding a verbal punctuation mark affirming the sentence in a polite manner (as it is the polite form, not a plain form like “da”).

So, by idiomatically remarking upon how someone else is tired, this is implicit recognition of that person’s hard work.

An Anime Pun

In the mecha anime television series Godannar, puns are heavily involved in the names of people and machinery. But never mind that. We’re focused on a different pun.

When the leading character of the show, Go (shown above), is done his “work” for the day (he’s a giant robot pilot, that’s his day job…), he gets mobbed by staff who keep going

「お疲れ様です」

in different speaking styles. At the end of the ritual, he wearily remarks

「疲れてねえよ。」

“I’m not tired.”

(The writer of this article takes a brief moment to laugh.)

Now, where it really gets funny is… at the start of the show, it’s his wedding day. (So of course some giant monster picks that day to attack. Of course.) And his angry left-at-the-altar wife pursues him all the way onto the battlefield, not being the “nobly waiting” type.

To boot, she calls him by her pet name for him, Go-chin. Rather than -chan, this uses -chin because put together, this is an… impact sound effect. gachin, gochin… it sounds very similar. It’s like the sound made when an anime hero smashes something with his fist, like Go’s personal combat style.

So with all this revealed in front of his co-workers, he is greeted with the following:

「お疲れ様です、ごーちん。」

“O-tsukaresama desu, Go-chin.”

(The author rolls on the floor, laughing.)

So after that, Go says very wearily,

「疲れてねえよ！！」

“I’m not tired…!!”

Perhaps not in a physical sense…

So there you have it. A gag based largely upon a literal response to a figurative expression.

Did you know Japanese had it in it? Did you? Well they know how to do pun gags too. Note it for future reference. – J

“Uro uro” is not, technically, a sound effect. It can be written in hiragana rather than katakana as うろうろ because it is a native Japanese colloquialism. However, to differentiate it as a colloquialism, it is often written in katakana anyway, as I am doing here.

Here’s a quick run-down of how “uro uro” is used.

ウロウロする (uro uro suru) is the -suru verb form of “uro uro.”

“To uro uro” is to loiter, to wander aimlessly, and so forth.

If a mouse (鼠、ねずみ, nezumi) is ウロウロする (uro uro suru), the mouse is scurrying about.

If a little blond girl in a pretty pirate outfit is ウロウロする in a mansion searching for pirate treasure, she is roaming about as she searches.

In the above case, the girl was told by another character in the Japanese PS3 version of “Tales of Vesperia” that the mansion was no place for a little girl to be “uro uro suru” (uro uro-ing) in. That is, it was a quite dangerous place for a little girl to be, so she shouldn’t just wander around on her own.

If we used this as an adjective, we could have an ウロウロな話 (uro uro na hanashi), a meandering story, that is, a story that wanders from place to place, seemingly aimlessly.

That is how “uro uro” is used. As it is a commonly known colloquialism in Japan, it will appear in manga, video games, and so forth, without any regard for Japanese language learners.