Archives for August, 2007

Comic confessions

I have never seen an episode of Berserk. Don’t think I ever heard of it, even, until I heard fans in Europe and America talking about it. Frankly a huge portion of the stuff that gets popular among anime fans overseas is comparatively minor stuff over here, watched by the sort of people who go to fan conventions and take digital pictures of 30-year-old women dressed in “futuristic” schoolgirl costumes.

My wife was born in 1976 and watched lots of shows as a kid. Her youngest brother is 11 years younger and she watched a lot of stuff with him when he was a tyke. So she has seen two generations worth of popular anime shows. We sit down to watch one of the anime channels we get on our cable setup every once in a while and see all kinds of things we haven’t heard of. When an ad comes on for Cowboy Bebop she doesn’t know what the show is. I don’t know either, really; it’s another one on my never-watched, never-heard-of list. The show has a considerable following overseas, but isn’t really on the popular culture radar here.

pro-golder-saru.pngThe average Japanese person my age grew up watching things like Hokuto no Ken, Kinniku-Man, and Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro. Maybe a little bit of Pro Golfer Saru action, or some Dragon Ball when the show first started in the late 1980s. (It was actually good before they started leaving planet Earth to fight random aliens and defeating them with the OMFG LAST OUNCE OF STRENGTH!!!1 and then discovering that wow, there’s a whole new planet filled with even tougher foes.) The popular cartoons in Japan are often not the ones that overseas fans latch on to. It’s interesting to observe.

There’s a good What Japan Thinks post looking at the cartoons from the 1990s that people today most want to watch again. At the top of the list is Warau Serusuman (The laughing salesman), which I read in manga form and enjoyed a lot. Another interesting list (linked at the top of the WJT post) is this one, which details the top 100 anime as picked by people responding to a poll on TV Asahi’s website. The comments (Where is my all-time favorite? Those top picks are dreck!) are as predictable as they are angry.

I was actually surprised to see that Chibi Maruko-chan came in only at #86 on that TV Asahi list, and that Sazae-san didn’t make the list at all. Those two shows fill a heavily watched Sunday evening hour, and are probably among the most-watched cartoons in Japan, along with things like Doraemon (#31).

I have this idea that somewhere in Japan there is a guy who thinks the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers are the greatest artistic product ever to come out of the USA and is waiting anxiously for the next fan-translated issue to hit the underground comic store. But that doesn’t change the fact that this American (and most of the ones around me) grew up watching Scooby Doo and the Superfriends. Y’know, dreck.

08/22/2007 | Japan | Comments Off

Computers don’t do this yet

The New York Times has a piece on the interpreting industry that’s worth a look: “Some Words About Interpreting.” It’s refreshing to see an article that isn’t breathlessly relaying the latest press release from some tech company promising a breakthrough in machine translation, and actually talking about the fact that multilingual people are in demand and making money.

It’s also interesting to see the info on the size of the telephone interpreting business. These companies have thousands of workers on the books. The president of one services firm says “his interpreters help police officers and other emergency workers deliver an average of 10 babies a day.” That’s a lot of “Breathe! Breathe!” in different tongues.

There was also a bit that I found interesting as a teacher of translation to students who pay quite a bit of money for their classes:

[Language Learning Enterprise founder Kathleen Diamond] seemed to be coasting in early adulthood along a predictable middle-class path, marrying, having two children and holding down intermittent teaching jobs.

Then, the proverbial light bulb went off. In 1979, Berlitz offered her $4.25 an hour to teach French to students who were paying $25 each for the lesson. Assuming a class of 10 students, well, you do the math.

“It was that huge gap that set off something in me,” she said.

I’m making considerably more than $4.25 an hour there, but it’s something to keep in mind for the future.

08/21/2007 | work | Comments Off

Pixels tell the tale

A couple of cool links found on Mezzoblue some time ago:

A to-scale image of a hydrogen atom. One proton (1,000 pixels across), one electron (1 pixel), and eleven freaking miles* of empty pixels separating them.

* Seriously. At 72 px/in, that’s what it comes out to.

The population of the entire world. One pixel for you, and the rest of the 6.5 billion pixels in the image are for all the rest of us.

08/21/2007 | web | Comments Off

Twitter: 2007-08-20

  • Gradng some tests while watching Sakura sleep. Being in love. #

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08/20/2007 | web | Comments Off

JASDF One




JASDF One

Originally uploaded by Durf

Nearly three years ago I went to New York for about 20 hours. Flew over on Tuesday afternoon, landed on Tuesday evening, did a bit of translation of one possible speech the prime minister was going to give, woke up the next morning, found there was a revised version of that provisional speech, fixed the translation. Then we went in to listen to the actual press conference and took furious notes so as to remember everything that needed to be changed.

This is the finished product if you’re interested in taking a look at it. I spotted two mistakes in it soon after it was posted, sob. Oh well.

The government plane coming back to Japan was nice in all respects but one. Pretty spacious seats, with lots of empty ones for our gear. Great food. A couple of movies, which I ignored. And we landed at Haneda, which is fairly close to downtown, rather than Narita, which is an extra hour away by express train. Score. So what was the problem? . . . Smoking flight. Urk. I think this is one of the only trans-Pacific flights where you can still light up en route. The Japanese secret service dudes and all the press guys were loving it. I was choking. But lots of beer (free, of course, and to make things better they had the premium versions of all the Japanese labels; the gold Fuji-san can for Asahi and so on) helped to ease the pain.

Some pictures are up on Flickr now.

08/20/2007 | Japan, work | Comments Off