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Kouhaku, still

Yesterday's Kouhaku entry was not entirely complete, what with being written while I was on the phone with my office's tech support straightening out some issues with my employer-issued laptop (on which I spend more time keeping up with employer-mandated updates and maintenance than I do actually working).

The on-hold music is so insidious that I completely forgot the Michael Jackson tribute impersonation by SMAP. This is good to know. I'll get myself put on hold with tech support next time I need to bleach my brain of something.

So, yes, during the "Let's take a moment to remember the artists who died this year" segment, SMAP danced around in the style of Michael Jackson while clips from his 80s music videos ran on the big screen (showing us by the contrast that no one but Michael Jackson has got Michael Jackson's moves). Considering it was SMAP, they didn't do too badly and SMAP even got to do an additional song of their own later in the program. I'm guessing that the extra screen time means that Annoying SMAP Guy has managed to rehabilitate his image since last fall's public nudity incident.

Last night some of my Kouhaku questions were answered on Wonder X Wonder, which did a "Backstage at the Kouhaku" special. The giant animatronic Mega Sachiko which I thought might have been in part a video construct was in fact an entirely physical construct. Eight meters tall! They showed a clip of Sachiko going to check out Mega Sachiko. "More eyeliner! Also, I don't do my lashes like that!" she declared and Team Sachiko sprang into action, spray painting on more eyeliner and trimming the eyelashes. We also learned that the animatronic effect of Mega Sachiko swiveling and nodding slightly at the audience was a last minute idea of Team Sachiko who implemented it by dragging on Mega Sachiko's base. They are lucky Mega Sachiko didn't fall over, but then Mega Sachiko was kind of bottom-heavy.

Wonder X Wonder also showed the mom of one of the Funky Monkey Babys turning up at NHK studios on the morning of the Kouhaku with a big mess of homemade manju for her son to distribute among her favorite enka singers and anyone else to whom her son might be beholden. How sweet!

Strangely watchable

We must be getting old.

Not only did this year's Kouhaku not have any run-from-the-room moments, but we actually watched the whole thing. Even at midnight, when we typically take a break from the Kouhaku by hanging out in the kitchen and drinking champagne, we brought the champagne and potato chips up to the sitting room and enjoyed the champagne with the Kouhaku.

The production staff must have been asleep at the wheel, preoccupied with the collapse of the world financial markets, or whatever it is they do when they're not dreaming up new ways to attach feathers to the NHK Hall dancers.

Usually they take the year's most irritating, earworm-spawning song and turn it into a twelve minute production number. This year? Did not happen.

Usually the sound engineers crank up the caterwaul effect on the enka numbers and leave the viewers clutching their collective heads in agony. Did not happen. Enka numbers actually rather sweet. Maybe they got some sound engineers who can hear frequencies in the normal (for humans) range.

Also, the creepiest enka singers usually get the longest songs, but this year they were rotated off stage rather quickly and with fewer than the usual number of extreme closeups. Phew! One of the enka men was backed up by the male NHK dancers wearing only haramaki and undershorts. Sadly, the dancers did not dance, but only posed in unison. (Maybe the Kouhaku producers should consider adding more scantily clad dancing men to the lineup.)

The ongoing battle of Kobayashi Sachiko and Mikawa Kenichi for the wackiest and most elaborate costume did not disappoint. While the costumes were similar (giant beaded caftans with tayu headdresses gone mad), the sets (also part of the costume) went above and beyond. Mikawa's had a sub-continental theme with the Taj Mahal on the giant screen backdrop surrounded by whirling lotus blossoms and the face of an annoying Japanese guy (not sure what his significance was) in blue. The NHK dancers were in Southeast Asian temple dancer costumes with moves stolen straight from the walls of Angkor Wat. No dancers for Kobayashi, who was out there by herself. Actually by herself as she was raised up in the hands of a giant animatronic Kobayashi in matching costume. (Still not sure if this was an entirely tangible structure or a combination of disembodied hands plus clever integration with giant video screen. Could not bring myself to look that closely.)

This year's giant video screen backdrop was a huge improvement over last year's. Much better resolution, to the extent that they were able to display photos and video during some of the songs, as opposed to last year's headache-inducing moiré patterns. For one enka song ("All I need is you and sake"), they ran sentimental snapshots of elderly couples who did not appear to be actively boozing it up. I guess snapshots of boozy seniors are too realistic for sentimental entertainment.

The children's numbers were strangely child appropriate. One of the children could even sing on key in a surprisingly powerful voice (is she the next Tendou Yoshimi?) and did a traditional pentatonic scale tune about a giant fish festival. The one surreal note there was Sakana-kun dancing around behind her with his plush fish hat on.

The pop singers were the big surprise. Most of the pop groups were singing and playing musical instruments. The minority were of the large ensemble, costume-wearing and dancing variety. The pendulum must be swinging away from idol/talent end of the spectrum. All is not lost, though, they still can't spell or capitalize so we had groups with names like flumpool and Funky Monkey Babys. The Funky Monkey Babys were pretty good, or maybe I just like the sentimental Japanese hiphop ballad genre. There was another hiphop balladeer who got to have audience participation in the form of sunflower waving, giving us a fine example of the deep conflict between the desire to move in unison and the ability to stick with a beat. One of the celebrity judges, Yokozuna Hakuho, was clearly hearing the beat of a different drummer and his sunflower was bobbing along in arrhythmic counterpoint to all the other sunflowers (and when I say "all" I do mean all).

And that was Kouhaku 2009. What's up? Was this a special watchable Kouhaku in honor of their sixtieth broadcast? NHK might think so. They did make sure to tell us that the Kouhaku would be available through NHK On Demand for the entire holiday weekend.

Does this signal a new trend in Kouhaku watchability?

We won't know till next year.

Whiling away

You could spend hours looking at old photos of Japan. (via, via, TYKIWDBI first seen via)

Listen closer

I've really missed my regular dose of Japanese news. I watch a little when I'm home on the weekends, but the daily weird I got from NHK news broadcasts is not quite made up for by my workplace, most days, anyway.

One evening at home, some months ago, I had the NHK news on (News at Noon, which means it was 11:00 pm EST). I wasn't really paying attention, but gradually the repetition of certain words, all in the same story which just went on and on, got my attention: arrested, arrested, suspect, public drunkenness (not actually a crime in Japan, certainly not anything unusual), losing endorsements (harsh, I thought, for generally accepted behavior), appearances cancelled (followed by a list of really wholesome sounding events and TV shows), arrested, drunk, Shibuya, SMAP, …

What? Ageing boy band, drunk in public? Tell me more!

I finally started paying attention. The newsreader let out a flood of unfamiliar words (obviously this public drunkenness was a little more involved, perhaps even esoteric, shall we say, than the usual variety), the images were fairly standard perp in police minivan footage captured at every high profile arrest, and I recognized one of the annoying SMAP guys. He does a lot of voiceovers in nature documentaries and makes guest appearances on all the holiday variety shows and quiz shows. I don't know his name. Oz thinks of him as "Oh, that NHK whore. He needs a good punch in the face."

"What did he do?" I ask the television.

Finally, the newsreader switches back to more garden variety vocabulary. "In a statement, [annoying SMAP guy] said, 'I have no idea how I ended up naked in that park.'"

"Oh." Well, that explains it. I can see how public drunkenness, in a park in Shibuya, and naked could get you bumped right off the family variety hour.

The Kouhaku experience

Due to an extended interlude of drinking champagne and eating potato chips down in the kitchen, I missed a fair bit of the evening's rebroadcast too. Bad Kouhaku reporter. I am left to wonder about the Holstein-patterned ballgown I glimpsed at the end of the morning broadcast.

NHK introduced a few new features to the production this year.

Swoopy camera angles: The person operating the camera crane at stage left had that thing swooping in and out and, while the camera was never upside-down relative to the center of the earth, it was everything but.

Giant screen used to migraine-inducing effect: Instead of the usual draperies, gelled lights, and projected stars, the backdrop was a giant screen which appeared to be made of giant LEDS. It seemed to be a light emitter, rather than a projection screen, but it was difficult to tell because the strobing, abstract patterns, particularly during the more techno numbers, were sort of hard to look at. Seizures! They're not just for epileptics anymore.

Sky-cam: Ever wondered what a skinny Japanese guy looks like from above? Basically, a dot. I think sky-cam is more effective for sumo. At least there's more of a horizontal component to the subject.

Drag queen smackdown: No actual smacking due to admirable levels of restraint on the part of the wannabe smacker. The Chinese-opera-esque stylings of the enka number turning into the big samba dance number actually caught us by surprise, though, so points for that.

Other than those things, not a lot of new stuff this year. Not even new songs. While the enka singers are expected to turn up and sing their big hits from years gone by, the Kouhaku is nominally a showcase for performances of hit songs of the current year. Well, we saw a lot of stuff from 2007, 2006, 2005 … Come on! "A thousand winds" again? "Zun-doko" again? What have you people done lately?

One new thing: Jero's Kouhaku debut! Jero, short for Jerome, is the new enka sensation of the year: an American kid from Pittsburgh who grew up singing enka with his Japanese grandma. Sadly, grandma passed away a few years back, so she didn't live to see her grandson appear on the Kouhaku (her portrait is airbrushed onto Jero's shirt), but his mom is in the audience and is appropriately weepy.

I missed the best moments when I looked away to type up notes. Like the moment when the pheasant-feathered, leopard print ballgown was ripped away (tearaway ballgowns!) to reveal a shiny black vinyl corset, pants, and stiletto-heeled boot ensemble. Tearaway ballgowns are not new, but they are usually torn away to reveal yet another layer of ballgown.

This year, the panel of judges had some entertainment value. The Kouhaku is set up like a contest: red team (ladies) vs. white team (gentlemen). (Gender-blurring people get to pick which team they want. Some of them who appear regularly on the program switch back and forth from year to year.)

A contest must have judges, and the Kouhaku is no exception. The panel is made up of judges, usually celebrity actors and athletes, a few other notables of the year, like Olympians. They sit there stiffly in their evening clothes with rictus smiles, except for the actors who are better at faking smiles. One notable this year was a guy who had the misfortune to write a bestselling novel. You could see the thought bubble over his head: "I'm. In. Hell." During the children's number (an amazingly child-appropriate tribute to Miyazaki Hayao), he failed to wave a puppet doll in time to the music like all the other judges (Thought bubble: "I'm going to kill my agent."). He must have grown inured to the situation, however, because 90 minutes into the ordeal, he managed some pleasantries with the emcees after a production number in which a giant crab and giant animatronic snack sellers appeared on the giant screen behind the giant stage and giant round staircase which formed the shell of the giant crab, while the entire cast danced around waving fans with hearts on. A picture would definitely be worth a thousand words here, because that description sounds pretty incoherent. I tried to find a video clip, but all I turned up was somebody else's liveblogging of the Kouhaku.

All in all, a pretty good Kouhaku, and I missed enough to leave me wanting more.

And wondering: Why the chicken dance choreography in all the production numbers? Why the animal print ballgowns? How did Thelma Aoyama get down that staircase alive in her super high-heeled boots?

The Kouhaku will not be liveblogged

I managed to miss the morning's live broadcast of the Kouhaku. Usually I sort of watch the morning broadcast so that during the evening's rebroadcast I can tell Oz (who is actively trying to block it out), "Okay, pay attention now. This bit is really horrendous."

I did get a few tantalizing glimpses during the quick review of the evening they run during the voting. Also, they had Enya, live from some castle in Ireland. In a red dress. Wow. Enya is really, really pale. Red is maybe not her color.

What did I do instead? I balanced my checkbook, cut off my ISP (we have a new one now) (so if you're someone who corresponds with me using an Earthlink address and you didn't get this morning's "hey, new email address" email, drop me a comment or a Flickr-mail, or something), cleaned out the fridge a bit, fiddled around with photographs, and not much else. This doesn't really sound like five hours worth of activity, does it? (There was coffee involved at some point … )

So the Kouhaku will have to wait for tonight.

NHK makes tame, ghastly family entertainment tamer, ghastlier

TV viewers shocked. No one thought that was possible.

After last year's Kohaku incident with the not actually nude backup dancers, NHK decided to make this year's Kohaku the tamest ever. Even the wacky drag performers with their wacky costumes were operating at their standard level of wack.

The only really horrifying number was, as I have grown to expect, the children's big song and dance number. This year we were treated to the sight of 500 or 600 little children with bug puppets on their hands spanking their booties and singing about the butt chewin' bug. Just so we couldn't miss the point, their costumes all had big, yellow, butt-enhancing bloomers. That number was mercifully short, yet somehow, not short enough. And even that was contrary to the usual policy of taking the most excruciating song of the year and turning it into a twenty minute extended dance mix. One year a song called "We've got tomorrow" was really big (and extremely annoying) and the Kohaku version of that song Did. Not. End. I think they're still performing it in a damp, dimly lit corner of NHK Hall.

Actually, that would explain why we haven't seen anything from that particular boy band lately.

Happy 2008, everyone! Akemashite omedetou!

Let's hope that Year of the Mousie lulls the NHK people into a false sense of security so the Kohaku can get back to its proper business of horrifying the viewing public.

So long and thanks for all the work!

It's so much fun being a white collar day-laborer.

Last week the client who sends me a nice steady flow of translation work (as opposed to the other clients, who send me work occasionally) announced that they are eliminating their translation division. I suppose they noticed that the translation division wasn't making any money. Oh well.

But they like my work and if they start buying translations again, they'll totally call me.

Um. Thanks.

I finished up the last bit of work for them on Wednesday. Thursday I did chores. Friday, I faced up to the wonderful world of un(der)employment. Now I really have no excuse not to look for a job, which I haven't been doing actively because job hunting sucks and because I've had money coming in. So on Friday I applied for a proper grown-up type job (also, chores and errands). The plan for Monday? More of the same.

It's grueling, I tell you. Somehow I'm going to have to work in some kicking back and nibbling bon-bons.

Quiz Monster strikes again!

This was not what I was going to write about, but the wonderful world of Japanese TV has its way of sidetracking me.

Quiz Monster was on this evening and featured the usual lot of questions (like "fun with pork" back in January) that somehow miss the whole point of reality. Tonight's stumper was "What is the correct pronunciation of 'Kamehameha'?" Note: This "correct" has nothing to do with actual correctness.

By most native Japanese speakers, Kamehameha is pronounced exactly as it's spelled: Ka-may-ha-may-ha. The same accent is placed on each syllable because, in Japanese, the same accent is placed on each syllable of most words.

This was a multiple choice question, by the way. The choices offered did not include the correct pronunciation of Kamehameha. Instead, the choices were all the exact same Japanese pronunciation of Kamehameha, only with a slight pause at different points: (1) Ka May-ha-may-ha, (2) Ka-may Ha-may-ha, (3) Ka-may-ha May-ha, (4) Ka-may-ha-may Ha.

I'm pretty good at quiz shows. I'm pretty good at Japanese quiz shows. (I am a dork.) I usually get the answer right off, especially when I already know the correct answer. In this case, knowing the correct pronunciation of Kamehameha was not a help. My first guess was option (3). Oz said, "I can't even say it after hearing all that!" None of the Japanese contestants got it either, even after three guesses. The "correct" answer? (1).

Yeah. I can see that Oz and I will have to start defining a new kind of correctness, "Japanese correct," to go with our two kinds of weird: weird and "Japanese weird," which is a whole other kind of weird. Not necessarily weirder, but seriously other.

Please honorably accept our humble apologies

The other night I was doing my physical therapy and watching Close Up Gendai, a daily news show on NHK which typically features one in-depth story on some current topic. They do all different kinds of stories, from international and very local news, society and culture, and science. That night's story was "Whither keigo?"

Keigo is the Japanese system of honorific language, which doesn't have any exact parallel in English. Compared to keigo, formal English and casual English sound identical. Go ahead and read the wiki. It's quite interesting. Really.

The theme of the keigo story was that no one knows how to use keigo properly anymore, especially those young whippersnappers. Why? And what can be done about it?

There are a few reasons why. The principal reason is that interpersonal relationships have become less formal. For example, family members use the same register with each other as they do with their friends, whereas in the olden days, children would have used keigo when speaking with their parents. Since kids aren't picking up keigo at home, they're learning it in the streets. And fast food joints and coffee shops, from service industry workers who have to be trained in "service keigo" by their employers.

Anymore, the only place most people hear extreme keigo is on samurai dramas, where, between internecine warfare and ritual suicides, the female characters speak in ultra-flowery language, while the male characters use manly keigo (butch, yet still flowery).

As a result, keigo is getting weird because people don't have a good grasp of it. People are making it up as they go along and throwing in the service keigo, which is what they hear most on a regular basis. And the service keigo is not correct. Whose fault is that?

At this point in the show, the camera zoomed in on the sign of a fast food restaurant. The camera stayed out of focus and moved pretty fast, but not so fast that we couldn't all get a glimpse of the golden arches. Yes! The adulteration of the proud Japanese language is all the fault of the McDonald's employee manual! The set phrases to be used by employees speaking to customers were translated from English into incorrect keigo because there are no corresponding correct keigo phrases. Hence the introduction of the bugbear (to Japanese language purists) "yoroshikatta deshou ka" which is wrong keigo, but which is supposed to stand in for "Will that be all?" or "Would you like [fries with that]?"

Can keigo be saved? Language is a viscous system and these trends are hard to turn around. This isn't a new trend either. When Princess Diana and Prince Charles visited Japan back in the 1980's, it was scandalous how the Japanese newscasters reporting on the story stumbled horribly over their keigo, wrongly using super-humble forms for the royals.

Nowadays companies are holding keigo seminars for new hires to prepare them for properly polite client interactions. An employment agency is offering keigo classes for their job-seeking clients. The show dropped in on one of these classes where a group of young men were trying to un-learn their bad keigo and learn proper keigo. They all passed the written test, but failed in ad lib dialogs. The instructor corrected one student and told him the proper phrasing. The student said, "Ah, samurai poku." ("Sounds like a samurai.")

I think that's the crux of the matter right there. If proper keigo is something one only hears on TV in costume dramas, one feels pretty silly talking like that in real life. How would you feel if you had to speak Elizabethan English in order to be considered mannerly?

Keigo, use it or lose it. I bet keigo could be saved if it could be spun into a pop culture trend. Consider the staying power of Hello Kitty. All keigo needs is a pink bow and some glitter.

Dilemma (tho' not by definition)

I have a $200 ethical problem. I will probably end up Doing the Right Thing, but until I do, I have this ethical problem.

Once upon a time, in October 2005, I did a small translation job for a client with whom I have worked on rare occasions over the past 15 years. I invoiced the job (it was a little over $200) and then … nothing. Recalling that these folks tend to pay slowly but eventually, I didn't worry about it.

Time passed. I emailed the project manager a few times and … nothing. I eventually started calling and getting the "no record of that job, resubmit the invoice" runaround. By April 2006, I was annoyed and made more phone calls and eventually got through to the owner of the company. By accident, I expect. She apologized and cut me a check that day.

So, I received the payment nearly seven months after delivery. I haven't heard from them since, which is fine by me. I'm not inclined to accept work from them and they never were a significant source of my income.

Fast forward to today, when I received another check from that same company for that October 2005 job.

Yes, they are that disorganized. I wouldn't have thought it possible, but I have this check, for a job I've already been paid for (really, really, really late, and they didn't pay a late fee or anything), from a company who apparently has no record of having paid me the first time.

The right thing to do is to void the check and send it back with a note explaining that they already paid me (really, really, really late) last April.

The wrong thing to do is to deposit the check.

There is no sliding scale of right to wrong here, but consider the nature of $200. It's not a lot of money, but it's not a little either. If it were $50, it would be easy to do the right thing. If it were $1000, it would feel like stealing if I kept it.

But $200 is enough to want to keep. And they obviously don't miss it. $200 plus a bit will pay my monthly health insurance premium. $200 will pay a winter gas bill. $200 I could put towards my new roof.

I'm so tempted to keep it.

Quiz, Japanese style

On a stupid Japanese quiz show (Quiz Monster, I think), the question was "What US President has the name of some meat?"

Multiple choice: beef, pork, chicken, or ram.

Never mind that "ram" is not a meat. Rams are made of mutton. [ETA: Maybe they meant "lamb", which has the same Japanese transliteration as "ram" (r's and l's again). Except they showed a picture of a ram, with the horns and everything. Not remotely lamb-like.]

Do you know the answer? Rack your brains. Maybe there was a President Chicken. That is to say, a president whose name was "Chicken." The guy would have been pretty much unelectable no matter at what stage in US history he ran for office.

Still wondering?

The answer is "Pork."

For a second, I thought the quiz show was being clever about one of the hallmarks of the American political system, but no.

They meant "Polk."

Because "pork" and "Polk" have the same Japanese transliteration and they don't distinguish between r's and l's.

Hah. Hah. I guess you had to be there. And bilingual.

O-mamori

Enmusubi o-mamori from Myoryuji (the Ninja Temple) in Kanazawa, Japan.

O-mamori are lucky charms sold at shrines and temples. The enmusubi charms are specifically for catching a husband and they often come as a set of two charms.

I got these because I wondered what kind of husband a Ninja Temple charm might bring me. A ninja? A comic book superhero? So far, that hasn't exactly happened. But, as they insist during the Ninja Temple tour, the Ninja Temple "has nothing to do with Ninjas!" So maybe a ninja is too much to expect.

All things even remotely related to weddings just spring to mind nowadays. All the bridesmaid chat impelled me to pull these charms out and play with my camera. I thought I had a bunch of enmusubi charms, but I could only find one other. Really, with all the o-mamori I've got, I should have a bunch of husbands, wild business success, academic success (I did get that), travel safety (not so much, though maybe the travel safety charms gave their little all keeping me alive in the accident), no headaches, lots of money, and a Big Wish granted.

A few non-bridal things happened today. I got some work done. The cats peed on something that was machine washable and placed on a plastic-sealed floor. Now that the weather turned cold and dry, this pretty much blows my humidity theory and I have to conclude that they're just lazy little schmucks. And speaking of schmucks, when I went swimming at the YMCA, this jerk took my towel! At least it was one of the scruffy Y towels and not my personal nice towel with the ponies on it, which was safely back in my locker. When I finished my laps and went over to the bench where my flip-flops were and where my towel used to be, I saw another towel on the nearby windowsill, kind of wadded up and probably damp with essence of towel-stealing jerk. I guess he mistook my neatly folded, dry towel for his.

I bet they don't have a towel-retention o-mamori. I obviously don't have one.

Fun with live broadcasting

I may not have digital video recording capability, but a lot of other people do.

As I wrote on New Year's Eve, we watched the Kohaku, NHK's annual New Year's Eve program: a live broadcast of the year's popular songs. The DJ Ozma production number was way over the top for NHK's staid programming, especially where the stated theme is Family and Home. From us it wrung cries of "Oh! My! God! Are they naked? No … But— No. What's with the silver lamé lederhosen? Hah! He's flying! Can't they point him so he's facing the audience? Oh! Ack! Euw! Fake flower penises!"

That provides a tidy précis of the salient points, but you can watch it if you want. Lots of people put it up on YouTube. I picked this version because at the end it includes the reactions of the Red Team Mediator (Nakama Yukie, who played Gangster Sensei) and some of the celebrity guest judges. Nakama-san says, "Uh. Oh my. Well. What do you think about that?" The girl guest judge says, "Oh. Well. It was … interesting." The guy behind her says, "That was the best Kohaku ever."

Someone also posted the NHK apology they slipped into the broadcast a short while later. He says, "We've had some calls. People are concerned that maybe the backup dancers were naked. But they weren't. They wore body suits. We're sorry to have disturbed you."

On New Year's Day I checked the Kohaku site and found a more extensive apology (it's gone now) at the top of the page. Basically, they said, "They weren't really naked! We totally didn't know they were going to do that! They wore bikinis during the dress rehearsal! We're sorry sorry sorry!"

The incident even made the gossip column in yesterday's Washington Post. Also, an Arts column in the New York Times.

The people of Japan may be miffed, but, hey, this is why I watch the Kohaku. Oz watched it because I did. He says I now owe him several vampire and/or zombie movies.

[A food show just started on TV Japan. They're celebrating Year of the Pig by eating some.]

Window into "cool"

The scare quotes are definitely necessary.

NHK has a relatively new program called "Cool Japan," all about Japanese stuff that is cool. The show is so cool, it's even broadcast partially in English! Still, I have a feeling that by the time a trend comes to the attention of the NHK staff, makes it through production (and past the higher-ups who will probably block any story that they don't think reflects well on Japanese culture [this is a guess based on the uniformly cute and wholesome content of the show]), and hits the airwaves, it is no longer cool. It is merely "cool," a pale reflection of something which might have been sort of cool six months ago.

Add to that the five month delay between the air date in Japan and when the episode is finally aired on TV Japan, and I'm solidly behind the curve on Japanese cool.

Last night's episode was a special broadcast from Paris, where Japanese stuff is really trendy right now, or at least, it was back in July when the show was put together. Risa Stegmayer, one of the show's hosts, wrote a blog entry about it, all in Japanese, but with pictures of the Japan Expo in Paris. It was a total French geek fest! French geeks look pretty much like American geeks. Possibly even dorkier.

One of the French geeks was a woman who was totally into the maid thing. She wore a maid costume at all times (she claims her husband loves it). I had never seen an actual French woman in a French maid's uniform, even if it was a Japanese French maid's uniform.

Still, maid cafes are mainstream enough in Japan that there's even a Japan Maid Cafe Association. How can they forestall the inevitable progression from edgy to ordinary? Well, they can take a page from the book of the goth-loli nun maid cafe, which may implode from sheer trendiness.

The Cool Japan crew went shopping in Paris with a couple of the French geek ladies. At boutiques carrying Japanese stuff, the ladies pointed out all the items which they thought were kawaii while the Japanese film crew said, "Huh. That? Is kawaii?" One of the women picked up a kanzashi and demonstrated how she would do her hair up in a French knot and fix it in place with the kanzashi. "And it looks cool with my Kitty T-shirt!" At which point the film crew had palpitations. Wearing a kansashi with a T-shirt is roughly equivalent to wearing an evening gown and using a toothbrush for a hairpin.

How cool is that?

Deep-fried and crispy

I was just watching Good Morning Japan and a really appalling human interest segment.

Whale meat! Back in school lunches after twenty years!

Yay! Kids like deep-fried, crispy whale nuggets! They have to marinate it in lots of soy sauce and ginger to get the yucky smell out, and then into the industrial fryer it goes. Kids just love it.

Whale meat! Back in the supermarkets. You can get 100 grams of whale sashimi for just ¥ 500. Whale bacon is the most popular whale product. The consumers say, "I love it. It's so nostalgic."

Whale meat! Let's look at a seminar about new whale preparations. You can make nasty-looking whale dip and eat it with saltines.

I like whales and all, but not to eat. I think of them as sort of cousins. The kind of relative that you don't get to see much, but you don't want to chow down on either. (I just read an article about cannibals in Borneo.)

Resting

[Note: My hosting service just moved to another server. The site may look and act a little odd for a couple days while the DNS updates.]

The joints in my hands are aching too much for me to write lots of words. I had to use my voice recognition software for my translation work today. Fortunately for me, the article was accommodating and didn't include any of the usual gremlins which foil the VR software, like equations or Greek letters. Even so, some of the VR errors were especially amusing. "Many difficulties" became "many difficult Uzbeks." Yes! Darn those Uzbeks. So difficult and they will totally mess up your network protocol.

Why not enjoy a picture from the kitty-cam?

They are just finishing up their dinner, chunks of meats in gravy. Monte walks off, licking his chops, while Sparky (aka Fat Bastard) sits by a bag of recycling and mentally prepares himself to go back for more.

Linguistics, ladies' underwear, and the geek mind

Linguists use the term "back formation" to describe the development of new terminology for existing concepts when some new, similar concept comes along and differentiation becomes required. For example, once there were books. After paperback books were developed, what we used to call books were then called hardback books. "Hardback book" is a back formation.

Once upon a time, one could go to the lingerie department and find bras, padded bras, and pushup bras. Then, over the 1990s underwires crept into all but a very few bras, making life difficult for those of us who do not want red smiley shapes pressed into the flesh below our bosoms. (Did someone decree that red smiley shapes are the new sexy? I bet they didn't take a vote.) Since the turn of the millennium, pads have joined underwires and occupied all but a very few bras, making life difficult for those of us who do not want bras with bosoms already in them. (Did someone decree that we must all have Super! Huge! Breasts? With red smiley shapes underneath? If they took a vote, they used Diebold machines.) Of late, however, I've noticed a new lingerie trend, just barely budding out, to accommodate the consumer whose elderly non-wired and enhancement-free bras are disintegrating and who would happily spend money on new lingerie if she could find some that wouldn't set off metal detectors and violate the new ban on taking gels on airplanes. This new development in lingerie is being heralded with special signs and displays of …

Wireless bras.

Yes! A new back formation! Linguistics in action. The only problem is that in these days of packetized communications, the word "wireless" brings to mind certain, non-underwear-related associations.

When we walked by one of these signs, my poor brain was bouncing around between "Woo! Linguistics!" and "Internet! What's the power source?" The thought of buying lingerie was way down the queue.

And Oz turned to me and said, "You know, I saw that sign and I thought, I wonder how fast they are? What kind of data rates do they get? Are they 802.11g?"

Pom Poko

We just watched Pom Poko, a Miyazaki anime film about tanuki fighting to save their woodland home from development into a Tokyo bedroom community.

How do the tanuki fight? They use their magical shapeshifting powers and their mad testicular skills. At any sign of progress, they party down and they are easily distracted by thoughts of food. "Let's kill all the humans!" "Okay! But then where will we get tempura?"

The movie is fun and very Japanese, with the combination of low humor, mythological references, and a rather complex ending. We'd love to party with the tanuki. I think we can dance as well as badgers do.

For the first time I was distracted by the voice acting in a Japanese anime. This used to only happen with American animated movies, but now I've watched enough cheesy Japanese TV dramas that I can recognize the voices of the character actors in particular. So I'm looking at one tanuki and thinking, "That's the cow guy from Chura-san." (Ha! I just crosschecked the cast listings for Pom Poko and Churasan, and I was right.)

Propaganda

Japanese propaganda is pleasingly straightforward. It is also comedic.

We were watching an ecology show, featuring a close look at the slime from the bottom of Lake Biwa. A biologist brought up a lump of brown slime from a depth of ten meters and invited the spokesmodel to touch it. The model said, "O-oh. Is it okay to touch it?" She was a good sport about the slime-touching and observed how the stringy slime looked just like natto. (Also, making natto is easy and fun. Or it could poison you.)

After covering the proliferation of anaerobic bacteria in Lake Biwa, they cut back to our studio panelists: two young beautiful people, an elderly scientist, and a demon. (I wonder about the increasing frequency of appearance of popular, but edgy—in a mild, Japanese way—entertainers on NHK specials. Is this a has-been thing? The slow slide down towards hosting the regional family entertainment variety shows?)

The scientist talks about global warming, we see various visual aids. "Worldwide ocean currents will fail and it will be very, very bad!" Then they give us a news broadcast from the future. The anchor has plasticized hair and a silver lame blazer, because he's from the future. He talks with a reporter in the Amazonian desert and another reporter roasting in Paris. "My, you look very sweaty. Make sure you get enough water." Each reporter says, "Well, look at the devastation. You know, this all started a hundred years ago. It used to be nice, but those people who lived a hundred years ago, they really suck! They better take some responsibility and stop pumping out all that stupid carbon dioxide!"

Then the screen went all wavy and returned us to the present, where the studio panelists said, "Oh my! What can we do to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions?"

I don't know. The sight of a fake Japanese reporter in a fake pith helmet standing in a fake, computer-generated desert didn't quite have that effect on us.

But!

That's not a "but," it's a but, pronounced "BOOT-uh" with the OO like the .ue in "flue" only Frenchier. Say it with your lips stuck out as far as you can and you've said "Goal!" just like a French sports commentator.

I watched most of the opening match of the World Cup today, Germany vs. Costa Rica, on TV5. A proper football fan would have watched the whole thing, but I'm not and I had to do this work thing that one does.

The only sport I really follow is sumo, but I love watching the World Cup with French commentary. Sports announcer talk in languages other than English is fascinating because of how closely it parallels sports announcer talk in English, except where it doesn't. Much of what the commentators say you could translate literally and it would sound just like American sports announcer talk, but some aspects of what the French, Japanese, or whatever sports announcers say are so wildly different that it's nearly impossible to translate. So I put on my linguist hat and enjoy it.

The French commentary is so very, very French. Especially after (if) France gets eliminated, the announcers get really bitchy and you have this regular soccer commentary mixed with snotty remarks about the players' hairstyles or the players' looks in general. Although, if a player is particularly good looking, you get something like this snippet:

Announcer A: My, but that [Korean team captain] is quite handsome.
Announcer B: Yes, he really is (very good hair). And did you know that his wife? She is Miss Korea.
Announcer A: Miss Korea! Honh honh honh!

I'm not making this up. Imagine it with French accents. And the "Honh honh honh" seems to be French for "hubba hubba" or whatever is the current slang. I never imagined that French people actually said that. I thought it was a Mel Brooks joke. In the French revolution section of History of the World: Part I, the peasants say, "We are so poor we don't even have a language. All we have is this stupid accent. We all sound like Maurice Chevalier! Honh honh honh!"

Not that it has anything to do with soccer, but IMDB has other quotes from that movie. This one seems worth copying what with the estate tax vote bubbling up again:

Leader of Senate: All fellow members of the Roman senate hear me. Shall we continue to build palace after palace for the rich? Or shall we aspire to a more noble purpose and build decent housing for the poor? How does the senate vote?
Entire Senate: FUCK THE POOR!

Okay. So anyway, tomorrow is Argentina vs. Ivory Coast. As I recall, the Argentines have excellent hair. Even if you know nothing about soccer, really great soccer is fun to watch. The sheer athleticism is awesome and the crowd footage? Also cool. When it comes to wild fan costuming, American fans really don't stand out amid the line-dancing Senegalese ladies in full regalia, the Germans dressed like wizards, and so on. The opening pageantry for each game, where little children from local soccer teams escort the players out to the field, is cute too.

Even if you're not interested in soccer, get thee to a television and check it out.

Hardly ever

I had a great translator moment the other day.

I'd turned in a patent—an incoherent patent which had obviously been cut and pasted together from related patents. You can't really blame the IP attorneys, because they've probably had to draft a couple hundred of the things relating to this one technology. (I'm sure if the patent isn't awarded, resulting in lost profits and litigation, that the applicant corporation will have no compunctions about blaming the attorneys, but speaking as a human …)

The multifold challenge of the translation was to figure out what they were trying to say, find vague English terminology to match the vague Japanese terminology, and make sure that the translation made sense without my having to add content. The translation is being used for litigation, so it must say no more and no less than what the original said, and say it in the same types of words, because the patent attorneys are going to sit around and argue about the wording, as opposed to the meaning.

I figured it out, got the job done, and turned it in. This particular client has native Japanese-speaking, bilingual proofreaders who go through the translation and the source text to make sure that the translation is complete and correct. Then they call me if they have questions. I was expecting that the proofreader would have questions about this one.

He sure did, although about half his questions were more comments along the lines of "Damn, but this Japanese makes no sense." He started off saying, "Oh. These claims. Ugh. I didn't even understand them till I read your translation."

Yes! The Japanese was so bad that the Japanese person had to read the English translation!

This never happens.

I guess we could call this "Found in Translation"?

Day of editing

Editing a 12,000 word patent about a technical thingy with a lot of awkward terminology, translated while under the influence of antihistamines. It's as fun as it sounds, really.

Okay, it's not. Which is too bad because I am only half done and have another day left to go. I'm having to go through it line by line, comparing the source text with the translation to make sure that it's right, that I didn't change my terminology partway through. Except I did and so I have to fix it all. I am fortunate to have an electronic copy of the source text, so I can search on all the suspect words and check every incidence to make sure they all match.

I'm looking forward to getting out of the world of this patent, which is a scary, scary place where you can find the position of a location, but a position and a location are not the same.

Not the same at all.

Fold it three ways

A few weeks ago, we were watching a show on TV Japan about bottle rockets. They profiled some grad students in an aerospace engineering program at a university in Hokkaido.

The students were working on a design for fixed wing aircraft but using bottle rockets for propulsion. We got to see them go down a lot of blind alleys in their design, which I can totally relate to, and crash a lot of rockets. At one point, they tried to read a journal article about the physics of airflow over the surface of wings. The article was in Japanese and the students were native Japanese speakers, but they stared at it blankly for a while, then scurried away mumbling.

And I laughed at them! (Because I am heartless.) Those are the kind of articles I translate, although I handle material more in my area of expertise, like image processing and data analysis algorithms. When you're a translator, you can't stop with the blank staring. No, that is just your starting point. You then have to knuckle down and read it till you understand it. Or until your brain bleeds, whichever comes first.

The students' solution to their problem was more fun than sweating over the article. They consulted a paper airplane expert and ended up with a nice bottle rocket and a beautiful flight.

I wish translation problems could be solved with a little judicious folding.

Good enough to eat

Garages and wisteria at North 26th and East Broad Streets

Ooo. Pretty flowers.

This morning, half asleep, I wrote (in my head) a haiku about wisteria, but I don't remember it now. Something about bees and the scent.

Other stories about wisteria.

In Japanese, wisteria is fuji (藤). Once upon a time I went during Golden Week to a festival in Tokyo at a temple famous for its wisteria. They had their wisteria trained over trellises built out over a pond. By the time Golden Week rolled around, the wisteria were dropping their blooms and the surface of the pond was solid purple. Those were the days of film and I don't have a scanner, so no pictures for you. Like a typical festival in Japan, they had booths of games and little things for sale. At one booth, selling marbles, the proprietress had stepped away and left her West Highland terrier in charge. I have a picture of the dog sitting at attention on the chair behind the array of marbles with wisteria in the background.

The character for fuji is also read tou when it appears at the end of a two-character compound word. My first year studying Japanese, our teaching assistant's surname was Katou (加藤). One day, to kill class time, we asked her to write her name out on the board since we'd never seen the characters before (at that point we were still learning the hiragana). The first character was a snap, but when she started on the tou, and the chalk kept tap-tap-tapping on the board, we were aghast. Then we starting whinging, "But.it's such a simple sound! Can't you write it phonetically?" And that was pretty much the story for the next four years of studying Japanese. You get resigned to it after awhile.

A story about a homonym. Well, a rant about a homonym.

Fuji is wisteria, but fuji as in Mount Fuji is completely different: 富士. You can see the difference? In Japanese, Mount Fuji is called Fuji-san (富士山). Note please: this san (山) is not the -san (さん) used as a status-neutral honorific to follow surnames (such as how we in English might use Mr. or Ms. only not quite). San is the Japanese version of the Han dynasty Chinese pronunciation for the character 山 (mountain), and thus that is one of the pronunciations applied to that character when it was adopted by the Japanese roundabout the sixth century. Got that?

山 and さん are not the same word. Okay? Easy-peasy.

So here's the rant bit: It has happened more than once that I'm reading a book written about Japan by an ignorant non-Japanese, or listening to a news broadcast by an ignorant non-Japanese (Marketplace, hello? I expect better), and they burble along about how Mount Fuji is the symbol of Japan and so the Japanese like Mount Fuji so much they even call Mount Fuji Fuji-san. At which point I screech, "It's not the same san! Not. The. Same."

Oz has heard this rant many times. Now whenever Mount Fuji makes an appearance on TV Japan he says, "Look, it's Mister Fuji!"

It rains and it pours

I am the work toad. I agreed to translate some patents, then I agreed to translate some more, then I realized that the first patents were Twice As Long as I'd estimated. I got an extension, but I want to meet the original deadline.

Now it's all dry cleaning solvents and plasma displays around here. That and being glued to the chair in the office. One of the patents was written in the 1960s and is a translation of an American patent. Patent language has been refined a lot over the last forty years. I got one of the dread page-long sentences. Old school! And the benefits to society of the invention read like they were written by an engineering undergrad: lots of hype, no sense.

I did get a chance to go out for a walk while we were waiting on the pizza. I'm marveling at the wisterias getting ready to pop. For the last three springtimes I've been so busy with school that I barely noticed the flowers. (Like, "Oh, it's spring? Those are flowers. Now, how many bits do I need for this counter?") This year, no school! I have time to smell the flowers, at least when I'm not translating patents.

It's always a wonder how good wisteria smell. Good enough to eat, like flowers and cake. Once upon a time, I had a part time job in the mail order department of an independent bookstore. The store was in an old house in Georgetown, right next door to the Caféa Ruche, down by the canal, and overgrown with wisteria. For one week in spring, with the windows open, it was delicious to be there surrounded by books and breathing perfume.

My flower pictures never come out, so you get semi-derelict buildings instead:

North 27th and East Marshall Streets

Something's happening on this corner. The buildings have been sold and presumably the new owner isn't going to run a laundromat and scary apartment building.

Sounds like FUN!

I was translating an article about computer vision today. In the author bios at the end I found that these guys are working at an interesting place. The Future University Hakodate! More specifically, the graduate school. Wouldn't you like to attend The Graduate School of FUN? I think they even realize themselves how this sounds in English.

It sounds kind of appealing, but the big draw for me is that it's in Hakodate, which is a neat city. It's the gateway to Hokkaido, so they have some nineteenth century, Japanese frontier meets the Industrial Revolution architecture. The geography of the city is very cool too. I like how you can see the star shaped fort in that satellite image. I only got to spend an afternoon there in my travels way back in 1988 and we had to run around with one eye on our watches to be sure we didn't miss our train. One thing I remember, in a touristy area near that fort, there was a little old man carving and painting wooden rings with pictures of the special things of Hokkaido and Hakodate (lilies of the valley, a couple buildings, a mountain). He jumped out at us, said something in unintelligible English, and shoved one of those rings on my finger. It was a present for the blonde alien girl!

Ah, Hakodate.

So, like, it's fiction

But still.

I am annoyed by fake translator's notes at the start of novels. Memoirs of a Geisha has one, this other book that Oz picked up at the bookstore has one. Whenever I see them, I start hunting for a translator's credit on the title page. Then I google a little. ("This is so not a translation.") Then I get progressively annoyed. Being annoyed Lies in Fiction is kind of silly, but still.

I am a translator. My profession is not a literary conceit. Don't make up fictional stuff about fictional documents and pretend you've translated them when you made them up out of whole cloth. And if your work is published in another language, how is that fake translator's note going to be translated? Huh? Did you think of that? Of course not! What if your translator wants to write a translator's note?

No one ever thinks of the translators. Just ask the translators of The Satanic Verses who didn't get any protection after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

Oh, you can't. They're dead.

And try to avoid puns too, because those don't translate.

In contrast, fake editor's notes at the start of novels like the Amelia Peabody mysteries, for example, don't bother me at all. Possibly because I'm not an editor, but more likely because the notes are so over-the-top silly that there's no question that they're fiction. However, a friend of mine once admitted to being taken in by the fake editor's note at the start of a Jane Austen mystery, so maybe I should revise my irritation for her sake.

Other people's words

The article I'm translating right now is so dull! It's about an algorithm for solving some insoluble problem and a supporting data structure. Interesting in theory, yes, but somehow in the execution . What's keeping me going aside from the prospect of payment? The next article may be more interesting. In favor of this article: it's like a review and extension of that last computer science class I took.

But, the dullness! I resort to eavesdropping to find something to write about.

Last night at dinner, I listened to the group of boys sitting behind me. First a discussion about what shape pizza to order. Boy A delivers a treatise on how the sixteen inch square pizza is a better deal because "it's got more area than the round pizza. Plus it's got these central pieces without crust which have more topping flavor because the crust isn't there diluting it." He didn't pull out a calculator and start calculating dollars per square inch, but I think he should have. (Oz and I do this regularly, though we've never discussed the effects of crust dilution.)

Somehow I miss the segue and suddenly they're talking in fake English accents about Nancy Boys. Or at least two of them are, Boy C doesn't know what Nancy Boy means and demands an explanation. Boy A again has all the answers. He begins, "A Nancy Boy is an effete intellectual."

Boy C cuts him off. "Effete? 'Effete' is not a word."

"Yes, it is!" Boy A has a definition at the ready. I knew he would.

Surrealism

I've been watching a Japanese kids' program, Tensai Terebikun Max. It's been on for years, sort of like an analog to Zoom, and gets weirder all the time.

Okay, so they divide the kids up into teams and they play different kinds of games, word games, logic games, etc. The teams always have names and one of the teams dresses in black. The last set of teams were The Underworld Family versus The Rainbow something-or-other. Right there, that gets me, that a team on a wholesome children's program gets to be evil. I think it's kind of neat, actually. The current set of teams, we have the Steam Knights, in red and sort of steampunk and knightly, versus the Jokey Mahones, in black and with a sort of early twentieth century gangster thing going on. Except it's not the Jokey Mahones, as I discovered today when I saw their name written in Roman letters for the first time.

They're the Jokey Mahorns.

This individual's theory (in Japanese, so if you can't read it, that's why) is that the "horn" part is a pun on horn like musical instrument and horn like a cow's horn. Now that I think of it, the Jokey Mahorns had horns on their helmets when they played paper airplane football. Okay. I'm glad that's resolved. (In Japanese, punning is the highest form of humor. I love it.)

The reason for my confusion is that Mahone and Mahorn are homophones when transliterated into Japanese.

But that's not the weirdest thing going on with this program. Right now, at least in TV Japan time which is on a bit of a delay, they're running a little serial drama called "My Tail" about a girl who wakes up one morning with a tail. Only it's not a tail, it's a space alien shaped like a tail, whose head is a green pompom with a little pink pompom antenna on top. And it talks to her. It gives her superpowers sort of: she can run really fast and do much better in gym. The downside? It occasionally knocks her out so it can converse privately with its buddies out in space who are planning to take over Planet Earth.

You can't make this shit up, people.

Oh, wait—

Digging for details

These articles I've been translating lately all include author bios at the end. You'd think translating the author bios would be easy money, but you'd be wrong. A lot of the information is abbreviated and, because many of these university departments and research institutes have an official English name, the official name has to be dug up and used. Also, these institutions reorganize and change their names frequently enough that I often have to find the official English name from two names ago.

Actually, the more of them I do, the easier it gets, so I can't complain.

Today, the authors of the article were a bunch of quitters. Usually the bios are mostly a list of degrees attained, but today's crop just about all had the word chuutai (中退), literally "drop out," somewhere in their bios. One guy dropped out of several degree programs, including a University of Tokyo program (hard to believe his parents didn't strangle him), but somehow managed to pick up a doctorate.

The first thing I do anymore is google the author's name spelled out in Roman letters, and maybe the name of their current employer, to see if they might happen to have a web page with their CV already in English. With one author, I struck gold: I found an English version of his bio which was almost identical to the one I was translating. Copy, paste, make a few changes!

With other authors I didn't get the gold, but I got something a little more fun. One had a personal page with a mixed Japanese and English CV, and pictures of himself barbecuing unidentifiable bits of food. He also had a link titled "Dog! Dog! Dog!" which led to a page of pictures of his fluffy dog, Princess. The pictures all had captions like "Hi! My name is Princess!"

After a while, the bios start to read like personal ads. "His research interests include compiler optimization, software engineering, and computer architecture." It seems like the next sentence should say something like "He likes soaking in the local hot springs, long walks on the beach, and bicycling …"

While I was making up a fake personal for one author, I discovered that he did, indeed, like cycling. I found an article in English about his wife and how she's visually impaired, but she participated in a bike tour around Shizuoka with her husband on a tandem tricycle. She said it was lovely, she got to smell the salty sea air and her husband described the scenery to her as they rode along. Aw!

Whenever I find fun author links, I want to paste the link into the translation so the copy editor can enjoy them too. I don't, because we're supposed to be all professional-like, but it's tempting.

Don't look now

But I'm ahead on my work. I had to translate a paragraph that went on for a whole page to get there, but I did it. A whole page! Seriously, a two-column magazine-sized page. Most Japanese authors insert a paragraph break every couple of sentences as a matter of course, but not these guys.

("Hometown Treasures" on TV Japan just went to a little town in Kagoshima that I've actually been to. Among other things, they looked at a little bridge, where a little boy happened to be taking his turtle for a walk. Turtle. On a leash.)

And when I finished my work for the day, I went for a walk and it smelled like autumn outside.

Still working

In a couple weeks I'll get a weekend off. Maybe.

In the meantime, I have to translate and proofread, translate and proofread. My poor brain about gave out on me today. When I finished up translating and formatting the two articles I wanted to proofread tomorrow, it was only late afternoon so I started with the proofreading. Hah! Tried to start and didn't get beyond the first sentence. My brain trembled like a bowl full of jelly and, although I knew that some revision was called for, refused to put the words into better order.

I went and had a whiskey, after which my brain felt normal, so then I had another so I would at least feel like I'd had a whiskey. Now I have a headache, that's karma for you.

I just glanced at the calendar and decided to ask for an extension for one of those articles that didn't have a deadline anyway. I'd really like to get their work done in a timely manner, but I think it's more important that I take the time to do a good job. Also, I don't like suffering.

The reality

It's time to take a break from writing about my long weekend. Seriously, five entries so far on a four day vacation? It might seem excessive, but I've done nothing but translate since we got back. Well, that's not exactly true, I've also been doing laundry, washing dishes, and running the vacuum. I managed to hurt my knee while doing laundry (don't ask) and I'm icing it down even as I write.

The material I'm translating right now is fairly interesting, but it kind of bums me out. These are scientific papers about basic research projects related to computer science and logic design. The whole time I'm translating, I'm thinking, Wah! These are the kinds of projects I want to be working on, not reading about! Even so, I realize that I have been very lucky that I was able to start working steadily, at something that I like and am good at, as soon as I finished school.

If only it made decent blog fodder! I spent the day working on an article about a character recognition system for handwritten addresses. I'm up to the experimental method and results part and the authors have begun doing some serious handwaving. Handwaving is hard to translate.

Weird mascots

The US isn't the only country that comes up with dumb mascots for big sporting events or the like. I saw on the French news the Italian mascot for some soccer related thing and it was similarly awful. I seemed to have blocked out all but the nightmarish image and don't recall enough relevant information to find a link.

Dreadful mascots are a human universal and the Japanese are no exception. This year, they're holding the Aichi Expo, the theme being "nature," much of which was paved over the build the Expo facilities. The mascots are these green pompom creatures, Morizo and Kiccoro, who have a flash-laden page about their vacation including some games and other things that make no sense, and to whom I'm being systematically overexposed by TV Japan.

Every day after Cooking for Today, they air two five minute Morizo and Kiccoro episodes. Each episode begins with the pompoms undulating to a Cuban-style melody which rapidly degenerates into a Japanese-Cuban psychedelic song with pompoms pulsating and multiplying in geometric patterns and popping their heads (or, at least, the top part of their bodies where their faces are) into the screen from all sides.

Then the episode begins. These are only five minutes, so they don't have a lot of time for plot development, and the target audience is the four-and-under set. A typical story runs along the lines of Kiccoro sees a dandelion growing all alone out of the sidewalk and feels sorry for it because it must be lonely. So Kiccoro and Morizo decide to sit in the middle of the sidewalk all day to keep it company. The next day, they come back and find it's gone to seed. They day after that, they find lots and lots of dandelions around so they don't need to keep it company anymore. The end.

Today, Kiccoro made a friend: a butterfly in the autumn woods who was all alone because all the other butterflies had gone for the season.

If you go all the way down to the bottom of this page, you can see some blue links (all in Japanese) which give you a pop-up window with a synopsis of the episode (also in Japanese) and a little picture. Click on the picture to see a clip of the video in Windows Media Player. In Episode 2 of Series 2 (the penultimate collection of links on the page), Kiccoro is standing on a small hill in the dark—the vast, vast dark lit only faintly by stars and bordered by looming mountains. It is calling out for its uncle repeatedly and at increasing volume and gets no reply. Until the end when Uncle calls, "Shut up!"

I'm kind of getting into the underlying nihilism.

Magical thinking

My magical thinking approach to my freelance translation workload didn't work out this time.

As I've mentioned before, I've noticed that large quantities of work drop from the sky when I plan a lot of chores. Accordingly I try to come up with big to-do lists when I want to get some work in. Likewise, I procrastinate on the chores when I want to get a little time off.

Today I procrastinated. I've been working over the last several weekends and I figured I was due for a break. A couple days in a row sounded about right. Sort of like a weekend except in the middle of the week.

It even worked for a few hours, although Oz tried to scare me this morning. He called and, disguising his voice, said, "So, you wanna do some translatin'?" But then I started thinking of the chores I should do tomorrow and when I checked my email this evening, I found 5000 words about a water filter.

Fun facts

Several years ago, I read that women who wear lipstick every day ingest several pounds of the stuff over the course of their lives. I just googled this to check and a couple places say 20 kg, which is 44 pounds and rather an exaggeration, don't you think? But four pounds, or six pounds, or even just two pounds is too much. I only wear lipstick a few times a year, so I'm not at any real risk for mass lipstick ingestion.

And I'm glad of that, especially because today I started translating a patent for a novel method of preparing stick-shaped cosmetics, including lipstick, sunblock, concealer, and the like, complete with lists of ingredients. That is some nasty stuff that goes into lipstick, which explains the nasty taste it has.

One of the things I like about translating is getting to learn new things with every job. The downside of that is sometimes you learn things you'd rather not know.

Lost in space

My Japanese station didn't cover the space shuttle launch live today, but they had a big thing about the shuttle on the morning news, featuring Noguchi in particular, of course. One of the clips showed Noguchi getting all geared up this morning and holding up a sign saying "Out to Launch" in English. For the benefit of the TV audience, the NHK folks had that translated—literally—as "Youyaku, uchiage." It's too bad that in Japanese "launch" (uchiage) and "lunch" (hiru-gohan, or ranchi if you're being fashionable about it) don't sound anything alike. Puns rarely translate well.

But anyway, they had Mohri-san on to talk about the shuttle and all the safety issues. He did a demonstration with the space caulk (the special paste that hardens into something heat resistant enough to survive re-entry) and the special caulking gun to show how tiles could be repaired. Although well meant, the demonstration just did not look all that convincing. It looked like caulking.

I did listen to the live launch broadcast on NPR this morning and wore my NASA earrings in solidarity. I hope the mission gets more coverage over and above the "Hey, it didn't blow up!" variety.

Statistical probability

When my translation inbox is empty, I try not to worry about financial disaster and instead make a list of things to do, so I'll be too busy to worry. Often translation work will pop up and then I won't get chores done, but, hey, the bills will get paid.

I've developed a superstitious belief that making a to do list compels translation work to arrive. The longer the list, the larger the amount of work. The more pressing the chores, the tighter the deadline. Or at least that's how it seems. That's how superstition works. When I have a list of chores and no translation comes in, then I just do the chores or goof off and don't attribute the situation to some supernatural hiccup in the universal gullet. If, under the same conditions, a load of translation arrives, then it's the universe belching.

But today I had a big list and really needed to run to the grocery store and the bank. First thing this morning, a client emails me with 13,000 words to be done by next Wednesday. (For me, this is a tight deadline for that amount of work.)

Coincidence? Dark forces?

I need to start keeping records to see if I can quantify this phenomenon (I don't think I'm imagining things) and twist it to serve my ends. I also need to get to the grocery store.

A matter of substance

More translation work came in, so I can thumb my nose at the wolf hovering around the door and look up nifty words. I now know a couple different ways to say "dermabrasion" in Japanese. The document I'm working on relates to a widget that Does Things to skin (not including dermabrasion, oddly enough).

I'm reading along, doing my initial read-through and terminology research, when I see a word I don't need to look up:

肉眼

This means, basically, "the naked eye" or in this context "visually" as in "the operator visually verifies the area to be treated."

But literally it means "meat eyes." Use your meat eyes to verify…

I can't translate it like that, obviously, but I can't read it without thinking of The Wizard of Oz:

"What is that little animal you are so tender of?"

"He is my dog, Toto," answered Dorothy.

"Is he made of tin, or stuffed?" asked the Lion.

"Neither. He's a—a—a meat dog," said the girl.

In multiple languages, no less

This was a first for me. I just had a telephone interview, in Japanese, with a Japanese company, for an engineering job.

I never actually had a regular job interview in Japan, although I did have a couple little part time jobs when I was an exchange student. So that part was new.

The telephone interview? Also a first. I was on speakerphone, so I had a hard time differentiating between when they were muttering amongst themselves and asking me questions.

It's been a while since I spoke Japanese for any length of time. I did better than I expected, although the polite dialect pretty much fell by the wayside right away as if I were a little kid (for which I apologized in—all cringe together now—casual dialect).

I interview about as well in Japanese as I do in English, so that's not saying much. Whenever I finish a job interview, I realize that I'm a complete idiot because afterwards I can think of much better ways to say everything that I said. I'm finding that I talk (or, let's be honest, blither) in pretty much the way that I write. The way I write a rough draft. Unless it's something that I obsessed over in advance, in which case I do pretty well. Because the way I write? I write a bunch and then cross out all the dumb stuff. What's left sounds pretty good, for the most part.

Baseball

One of the big sports news items in Japan right now is the formation of a new baseball team, the Rakuten Eagles. Every imaginable bit of excitement is being squeezed out of the event. It's even penetrated to the weather report.

This morning (Japan time), one of the various regional weather reporters comes to us live from a sports stadium in Sendai with the Tohoku Golden Angels, cheerleaders for the new baseball team. They have golden pompoms, but no wings. Instead, they have on the cheerleader "cowgirl" outfit: hot pants, white fringy cowgirl boots, crop tops, Western-style fringy boleros, and cowgirl hats.

It's chilly in northern Japan this morning. At last, the weather reporter finishes his report and the girls get to do their cheer, during which I experience a fair amount of cognitive dissonance. In the first place, the girls are kind of clumsy. In the second, the Rakuten Eagles song is blaring, the lyric consisting mostly of "Rakuten Eagles!" repeated over and over a background of marching band music, but with the Japanese accent it sounds like the vocalist is saying "Rakuten Igloos!" (Well, it is chilly.) And the big finish to the cheer is a rousing "Go, fight, win!" from the girls, but with their accents it sounds like "Go, fie, ween!" Come on, ladies, let's hear a "fight-o!" It'll maybe warm you up.

Sports commentary

We're watching the Osaka Basho. Sumo, served up fresh in the daily digest, which distills ninety minutes of glowering (interspersed with maybe three minutes of actual sumo) down to twenty-five minutes. We kind of miss the glowering, but we don't have time to watch the regular broadcast.

I interpret choice bits of commentary for Oz. The announcers always make sure to tell us which wrestler is having a birthday, whose mom is in the audience that day, or who just got married. Their sports commentary is equally hard-hitting: "Now Takamisakari leaves the ring, making that crybaby face he always does when he loses." (Really, it sounds a little nicer in Japanese. But not much.)

Our commentary is similarly informed.

When Chiotaikai is propelled three rows deep into the audience: "Damn, do you think he killed any of the spectators?"

When one wrester is caught in a still shot after a win: "Is Roho the ugliest man in sumo?"
"No. But he's the ugliest white man. And there are only three of them. Kotooshu isn't bad looking and Kokkai really looks like a cartoon character."
"Yeah, like Bluto."

When Dejima appears on the dohyo after having been dropped on his shoulder the day before: "Is that a bruise? I thought he already had dirt on him."
"'If you don't like getting dirty, you'd better not fall so much!'"
"Wait, did he put something on it? It doesn't look really bruise-like."
"It's—scabby. Euw."
"If he gets dumped on the other shoulder, he'll have epaulets."

Work is better than school

For example, you get paid for work. In theory, anyway. The jobs I've taken this week are from a translation company that I've never worked with before, so it's a crap shoot. I should be paid in mid May. I don't love net 60, but I know that money will be welcome then. Of course, it would be welcome now too.

Moreover, assignments are optional. If I'm too busy to take on a job, I can turn it down. That wouldn't go over too well in school. "Hey, Dr. Flight, I have too much homework already. You'll have to get in line." Yeah, I'd love to be able to say that and live.

On the other hand, the clients get to set the deadlines and they're setting them tighter all the time. Today one of my colleagues posted that he'd just received a job request with the deadline of 17 March.

I am not making this up.

Also, school is better blog fodder.

Advanced photocopying

The translation job that I got out the door today was a lease for office space in Tokyo. Leases are pretty dull, except for all the details about how the lessee is responsible and liable for anything that happens anywhere and the lessor gets all the money no matter what.

Whoever handled the photocopying goofed. They have the pages landscape instead of portrait and several lines of text are missing from the bottom of every page. I emailed the project manager to let him (or her? I can't tell from the name) know. This is how they received the document from the client, so this is what the client is getting back. But don't they need that clause about how the lessor can cancel the contract if the wind blows from the north?

The main impression I take away from this lease is "Damn! That is some seriously high rent!" It's like $80,000 a month for this space. It's a lot of space and it's in the heart of the heart of the business district. But still! If these people have that kind of capitalization, I should maybe send them my resume.

Encoding

On my daily rounds of favorite places, I visit Arts & Letters Daily, where today I found a link to this American Scientist article touching upon what it is to be human. The author's main topic is how having a sense of purpose is integral to humanity and one of the prime movers in the development of humans, which is not really a new idea, but is nicely stated here. The part that grabbed me was the statement of a problem of identity, that our constituent parts (atoms, cells, etc.) turn over periodically, but we still remain who we are. We are information encoded in a self-renewing biological storage medium, which is interesting to think about even if you're not into logic design.

The idea of how an entity's parts can all be changed, but the entity remain the same is paralleled in some of the practices of Shinto. I've been reading A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine (here's a review, the link to which I'm including because it was written by the father of a friend from when I lived in California and how's that for a small world?) and today I hit the bit where he mentions the tradition, not so widely practiced now, of periodically dismantling and reconstructing shrines. This "continues most noticeably at Ise Grand Shrine, where every twenty years the main shrine buildings are entirely rebuilt on an adjoining site. This tradition of tearing down and rebuilding has actually been instrumental in ensuring a continuity of form and ancient construction techniques that would otherwise have been lost."

Interesting how patterns repeat. And that I should find both these texts on the same day.

Setsubun

The first day of spring? By the Japanese calendar. Today and yesterday are Setsubun.

It's not very springlike on 3 or 4 February and, really, the deal with the groundhog makes a little more sense at this time of year. But I like the idea. Throw soybeans at the demons to scare them away. Shout at them and ask good fortune in. We could maybe give it a shot, except that all I've got in the house are canned beans. Oz would have to dress as the demon and it would be quite the mess. On the other hand, the cats would totally freak so it might be worth the cleanup.

I'm tempted to throw beans around the lab and call down good luck on all the senior projects.

After the sniff test

Today I translate (for money, even) the label on this clothing spray product. The idea is that you can spray it on your clothes and it will remove wrinkles and odors, leaving behind a smooth, crisp finish and a fresh citrus scent. The secret ingredient is "nanotechnology" which is, I guess, the new new buzzword.

I wonder about the advertising campaign. It can't possibly show how the product is going to be used, really. Because the image of a slob pulling a shirt out of the pile on the floor and spritzing it with Wrinkle-B-Gone is just not that appealing. Unless, maybe, the slob looks really good without his shirt on…

Other people's code

Other people never comment their code enough,
as if they think that time can pass and
they'll still comprehend
what they wrote
in a language not their own.
Everyone knows
the logic, so crystalline on Monday,
is muddied by Thursday
merely from time
and other distractions: writing
the rest of the code and
keeping the schematics
up to date.

(Don't forget the flow chart either. The flow chart
is very important.)

"What is this variable for? Why
does this function need it at all?"

Other people don't want you
to ask.
But it's the only way
to find the bugs.

A basic grasp of the concept

Back room of a used bookstore in Phoebus (You can't see it, but there's a toy zeppelin hanging from the ceiling.)
South Mallory and Mellon, Hampton, Virginia

My journalistic tendencies were in abeyance: I didn't write down the name of the bookstore or the street address. You can find it if you want. Take I-64 east through Hampton, Virginia and take the last exit before the tunnel. Follow the signs for Fort Munroe and you'll find yourself in Phoebus, a charming neighborhood outside the fort. The bookstore is on Mellon, among various antique shops and a few empty storefronts.

We pick up a couple nice books, including an old (it's at Oz's house, I don't have the date) hardback copy of Kim by Rudyard Kipling, from the racks out on the sidewalk and wander into the store. We see books, lots and lots of books. Tall shelves filled with books—lovely Victorian editions of Tennyson, modern hardbacks from remainder stacks, the Bobbsey Twins—vaguely arranged by category. Stacks of more books sit on the floor in front of the shelves, making the lower ranks inaccessible. Hand-lettered paper signs are stuck on the stacks: "Books in stacks not ready yet" and "Not quite ready" and on a cluster of six foot tall stacks, "If you see something you want in the stacks, please ask for assistance."

The back room has five shelves of books on railroads, three shelves of old mechanical engineering and machinery books, and two shelves on the occult—twice the shelf space allotted to physics. One of the occult books, The Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge, by Zolar was heavily consulted by its former owner, who made notes with page numbers on the flyleaf: Tea leaves reading & symbols pg 337, Astral plane 104, #126, Artificial Enities [sic], #132 Nostril breathing, Physical corps [sic] 114…

On my way out, I stop in a side room, where I spy a two foot high stack of Life Magazines, marked "Sold, do not touch!" In this room, the tops of the shelves are full of old toys in not the best repair, "Items on top shelves not for sale yet." I find an almost fifty-year-old copy of Lolita, bound in bright blue with faded gold letters. I open it up and find that it's a French translation.

Ah. Used bookstores.

A bibliophilic diversion

Though most of the day is spent hunched over my Digital Signal Processing take-home "mindterm," as the professor misspelled it in his email letting us know that he'd posted the test, we take a quick, necessary trip to the coffee store and stop to check out a new bookstore, the Black Swan, on our way home. We'd peeked in the windows before when the store was closed, but this time we can go in. The Black Swan is a used and rare bookstore so it has that great, old book smell. Moreover, they seem to have plenty of start-up capital; it's like shopping in the living room of someone with great taste in books and lots of bookshelves.

Since I'd spent too much money on mass-market paperback fluff last night, I restrain myself from getting a beautifully bound and illustrated 1873 edition of The Innocents Abroad. The $35 price seems more than reasonable though, and I'm now kicking myself over my misplaced restraint. Oz manages not to drool on the $275 coffee table book about netsuke, but picks up small books on Maori art and Japanese ink painting technique. I wander over to the foreign language section and see some Japanese books, including a Japanese translation of Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, but what catches my eye is an English-Japanese dictionary of which I've never heard.

As a translator, I'm familiar with the titles of most well-respected or commonly used dictionaries and if I see a new one, I simply must investigate further. This dictionary is Fuzambo's Comprehensive English-Japanese Dictionary, the 1942 Harvard University Press edition, with 1855 pages of esoteric English words, because when they say "comprehensive" they aren't kidding around. It's two and seven-eighths inches thick (I just measured) and so heavy I can't tachi-yomi (stand and read). I seek out one of the bookstore couches and settle in.

I don't even know these words in English: lixiviate, aardwolf, parapodium, pettichaps, flanconnade. Because this is an older dictionary, the kanji (Chinese characters) are in the old, more complicated style and there are very few English loan words. I always suspected that the Japanese word for "jump" was not originally "jumpu" and now I have proof! I show Oz and he generously purchases Fuzambo's for my collection of browsing dictionaries.

My favorite pages of the moment are the 654-655 page spread. The guide words are these: get-at-able, ghoulishly, ghurrie, and gigot. The four illustrations are of the ghat at Benares, gherkins, a gibbet (including dangling corpses), and a giant's stride. Other words: gew-gaw, ghastly, ghost word, gibbous, and gigantomachy.

This copy of the dictionary also includes a little history. Inside the back cover is stamped:

This Book is Charged to:

Douglas H. Eldridge [written in the hand of someone with bad penmanship, but trying to write neatly]

To remain in his custody during his enrollment in the Japanese course given under Navy Auspices. It shall be returned to the Navy Department on demand and, if in any case, shall be returned if and when the recipient leaves the Naval Service.

This Book is No. W37

I guess he didn't return the dictionary as charged. Judging by the wonderful condition of the dictionary, he didn't use it much either. But if you know this guy or you know any stories about the "Japanese course under Navy Auspices" in the 1940's, I'd love to hear from you.

Bawk, bawk

With apologies to Emily Dickinson, death is that thing with feathers. Black feathers. The icon used in Japanese news coverage of the avian flu crisis is the black silhouette of a rooster. Not to make light of avian flu, it's horrible for the birds and the people whose livelihoods depend upon them, but the Black Rooster of Death cracks me up. Every time I watch the news, I think, "Yes, Death is the thing with feathers." And then I am overcome with the urge to read Without Feathers, just to see if it's as brilliant as I thought it was twenty years ago. The library is closed now too. I ought to go ahead and buy a copy. Given that I'm twenty years more educated, I'll probably get more of the jokes.

And you makes your choice

Anything that happens in the United States makes it onto the Japanese national morning news. Medicare policy changes were even the lead story one day. Why? It's not like such things have any impact on or are of interest to the general Japanese population, unless it's to illustrate how the Japanese health care system is so much better. That being the case, it should be no surprise that the U.S. presidential race is pretty big news over there. Since it's Super Tuesday, that gets a mention, although it didn't lead. "Super Tuesday" isn't translated, it's just transliterated. The Japanese language doesn't have a "too" sound, so the transliteration is "Supah Choose-day". And so it is. During the story, I catch a subtitle out of the corner of my eye. "Bring it on!" is translated as "[maybe something, but I missed it] kakatte-koi!" Not that I ever wondered, but now I know.

Limit of vision

Spending hours staring at a Japanese confidentiality agreement more or less sucks the desire to words right out of you. Sometimes these little legal things are interesting, I especially like listings of disasters (Sinkholes! Lightning strikes! Bubonic plague!) for which, should they befall party B, party A has no responsibility. This one was mostly about keeping confidential the personal information of boring people who do boring things. Yawn. Who'd want to know anyway?

It didn't help that the document was really blurry, to the point where even words I knew were hard to recognize, and that my contact lens prescription is out of date enough to add extra blur. Blurry with blurring on top. The character 書 (write), which I learned back in Japanese I, was reduced to a little blot and I only recognized it from context. Eventually. When you stare at blurry text word by word, context tends to drop by the wayside.

When I went to the eye place on Monday, I got a new prescription, but they had no diagnostic lenses for me to try since I have a weird prescription that they don't keep in stock. They ordered some lenses, which finally arrived today. Anticipating clear vision with which to translate my document, I drove across town to pick them up, but when I got home and put them in, I was disappointed to find that the new lenses make things blurrier, except close up. It's like having on reading glasses. Accordingly I will be heading back over there tomorrow to try out some more lenses, whatever they have in stock. This time I will try them at the place and not leave (dammit!) until I get some lenses that correct my vision. This is going to put me behind on that working and studying thing I was going to be doing, but I really want to see again. Squinting at my monitor and bitching at the idiots who wrote my C compiler will be much more fun without eyestrain.

School was a welcome break from all such concerns. I ran over to campus for my math class at midday. Everyone was speculating about the tests we took last Monday and if the professor could take off so many points that you could get a negative grade, but we'll have to wait to find out because he had only graded one of them. More sets and functions. I kept my eyes open.

On the bright side, the man was around this afternoon and even cooked dinner tonight. He kept it simple so it turned out well: angel hair pasta with basil, pesto, chopped tomatoes, and olives, and I cleaned up after. Since the "cooking" was mainly a matter of boiling water and opening things, it wasn't as bad as you might imagine, although the pasta boiled over rather spectacularly. I wish I'd seen it, but all I saw was the impressive aftermath.

At the moment, I'm watching a Japanese nature show. The theme is reproduction in the ocean and I just learned how sea cucumbers breed. All I have to say is, I'm glad that segment is over. These Japanese nature shows sure don't shy away from yucky stuff. The earlier story about the floating flowers was much cuter, as are the baby seahorses that are on now. Since sea cucumbers are eaten in that part of the world, they probably don't fall into the category of yucky stuff for Japanese people, or many of them anyway. I can imagine the intended audience of this show crying "Oishisou!" ("That looks delicious!") when the sea cucumber appeared on screen. I've always found the habit of saying oishisou at the sight of a live animal to be strange, but it seems to be the norm (in my comparatively limited experience) in Japan. I finally began to wonder if there's another meaning to the word, however, after I saw some girls on TV say oishii when they saw a camel at the zoo. A camel? I really don't think those girls were imagining a tasty roasted joint of camel. Maybe it's a knee-jerk response to the sight of protein.

I'm not sure this entry is disjointed enough, but I am out of words and my eyes are tired. Note the common thread of eyes and seeing. That's the best I can do.

Input affects perception

In September, NHK, which I watch via satellite as TV Japan, started running a new serial drama called Teruteru Kazoku. NHK has been running these for fifty years: wholesome stories of Japanese women told in fifteen minute daily episodes over the course of six months. This current drama is sort of like Japanese Little Women, set in Osaka from 1950 or so onward.

In the show, the wacky Iwata family likes to make teruteru-bouzu (照る照る坊主) for good luck and good weather. One makes a teruteru-bouzu of a small scrap of white cloth or paper with a small rag or cotton ball wadded into the center and a tie around the cotton ball to make like a neck, and then one hangs it up by the neck. To my American eyes, they look like little Halloween ghost dolls. They also draw smiley faces on them, although whether that's traditional or just for the show, I can't say.

So for the first month the show is on, I have to get used to seeing these little ghosts, smiling and hanging by the neck, everywhere. Big ghosts appear in family portraits, without the family's awareness. In one especially surreal scene, when the little girls are learning how to ice-skate, some adult-human-sized ghosts skate around with the little girls and make a conga line with them. Maybe this looked cute to the Japanese audience, but it looked creepy to me, especially with the big smiley faces on the ghosts.

Can you see what's coming? By the time Halloween rolled around and folks in my neighborhood decorated their houses with cobwebs, skeletons, witches and ghosts, I was wandering around wondering, "Why all the teruteru-bouzu?"