Exactly a year after Nomura made its successful lunge for Lehman Brothers, the official line in Tokyo is that the merger is running like clockwork.

One or two oddments, though, are still getting lost in translation, despite the availability of native English speakers ready to take a glance over any important company circulars. A recent e-mail politely reminded staff in Nomura’s Tokyo headquarters that “gay colour nail polish and manicure” fell outside the company’s dress code.

The trading floor was also left baffled by guidelines on the correct type of trousers: “Wear the one gives to the ankle to the height of pants.”

Internally, everyone is convinced that the word “gay” was intended in its purely original sense of cheerful and bright. The problem is that many of the electronic Japanese-to-English dictionaries on sale in Japan are occasionally woefully behind the times on the more common usage of some English words. The Japanese compiler of the memo appears to have innocently typed the Japanese word hadena (gaudy) into one such machine and received the translation “gay”.

The awkwardly worded memo, which one recipient described as “sounding like a VCR instruction manual from the 80s”, was an attempt to rein in bankers’ attire after the long, relatively permissive days of summer.

September 30 marked the end of Nomura’s “Cool Biz” summer ecological campaign for its Tokyo headquarters — an annual scheme that amounts to turning up the thermostat slightly and allowing people to take off their jackets and ties.

With autumn now arrived, those carefree, tieless months are gone and the winter dress code is in force. “Bare foots”, said the memo, are no longer appropriate. Neither, it seems, are shoes “of bold handle”.

A Nomura spokesperson said that the “unfortunate” translation was a well-intentioned attempt by a manager to ensure that people knew that the summer dress code had ended.

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