Now Kotaku is a tech blog, so of course its writers will focus on the tech aspect of the story being told—here the iPad comments from a well-known animator. To its credit, though, it includes a solid paragraph presenting some of the additional nuance provided in the Japanese article it references:

He might seem like an eccentric technophobe, but he is coming from an “All I need are pencil and paper” point-of-view. That might be all he needs. He’s Hayao Miyazaki! And with those simple tools, he can create brilliance. Not everyone is talented as Miyazaki. Later in the article, however, he encourages people to become creators, and not simply consumers. With all today’s information overload, it is easy for people to lose sight of what they need to focus on to advance society.

I thought the following quote, included in that Japanese article, was far more illuminating than the “masturbatory iPad use” one. The interviewer asks whether technology like the iPad could be useful in research, offering a way to view information or even to order printed material for delivery. Miyazaki replies (my translation, which suffers from my not knowing what they were talking about up to this point):

Now look. This is going to come across as harsh, but there are some things you just can’t look up on this gadget. It’s because you totally lack an interest in the atmosphere aboard an atake warship, say, or compassion for the men who toiled sweating at its oars. You aren’t going out into the real world and pouring your creativity into something; you’re just skimming its surface, gripping your iWhatever tightly in your hand and stroking away.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who want to put their hands on the latest iWhatever as soon as possible and gain that feeling of omnipotence. Let me tell you something: In the 1960s there were people who went mad for these things called boom boxes—they were huge!—and carried them proudly wherever they went. These people must all be pensioners today, but they were exactly like you. They went crazy for a new product and felt smugly satisfied once they got it. They were nothing more than consumers.

You mustn’t be a consumer. Be a creator instead.

I’m glad Kotaku did include some of this in its English-language presentation of Miyazaki’s views. It’s disappointing, although hardly surprising, that many of the reactions I’m seeing to it on the English-language web is along the lines of “what a goddamn Luddite” instead.

The publication that carried this interview is a Studio Ghibli in-house monthly mag called 『熱風』 (Neppū). The July 2010 issue with Miyazaki’s comments actually dedicated its special feature pages to five articles on the iPad, which makes it hard to view the studio as a rabid den of technophobes.

Looks like an interesting read, and at just ¥2,000 for 12 issues, delivered, I think I’ll be subscribing soon. But here’s where I suddenly shift course and agree that Ghibli is entirely too technophobic for my tastes: to subscribe, you need one of the postal remittance slips included with each issue of the magazine, or, if you don’t have one, you need to send an SASE to the Ghibli folks so they can send you one of the slips. Meh. I’ll stop by one of the bookstores listed on that page to get a copy myself, or maybe just swing by the studio on my way home to cram my sweaty thousand-yen notes into their hands directly.

(Bonus postscript: It looks like there was a similar flap when Gundam creator Tomino Yoshiyuki addressed a video game developers’ conference and told them to stop creating wasteful, “evil” things. There’s coverage of that in English and Japanese, and, of course, plenty of responses from people who ignore the “strive instead to do something meaningful” sentiment in favor of pointing out various hypocrisies in his stance.)

Many candidates for the House of Councillors election taking place this Sunday] are famous figures from the sporting or entertainment worlds, and are perhaps better-known by their nicknames than by their real names. What happens when someone casts a ballot for one of them using a nickname instead of the formally registered real name?

Japanese election law states that votes must be counted for a candidate when they are clearly meant to be cast for that person, even if they aren’t written properly. [No hanging chad or punch holes in this system; names are written by hand into spaces on the ballot sheets.] This means nicknames could be acceptable, depending on the officer at the polling station—similarly written votes could be viewed differently by different people.

Tani Ryōko (née Tamura), an olympic gold medalist judoka, is one of the best-known celebs in the running this time around. She’s also well known as “Yawara-chan,” after the popular manga series Yawara! It’s indeed possible that votes for that name (whether written as 柔ちゃん, やわらちゃん, ヤワラちゃん, or Yawaraちゃん) could be counted for Tani.

Unlikely to be accepted, however, are votes referring to a candidate by his or her profession or other characteristic. Ballots bearing votes for “the gold medalist” or “the 48 kg weight class judoka” will be void. There’s a strong possibility that votes for “Tamura Ryōko” will count [take that, LDP guys opposed to separate names for married couples!], but a simple “Tamura” will not, as there are other candidates with that family name in the running this time, who would end up splitting the pool of votes cast in that format.

Clumsily cast votes for “Kawara-chan” or “Tawara-chan” will be left to the judgment of the officials on hand at each polling station, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ election department. “Problem votes” including those cast for candidates’ nicknames are pooled at each station and gone over by the responsible official with observers to witness the goings-on. The authorities urge people to write candidate and party names clearly and accurately to avoid slowing down the count with this process.

J-J dictionaries

大辞林 – I have this in paper, as well as in data for use in Logophile; I even bought the iPhone app too since it’s so nicely done there.

広辞苑 – This is considered the “standard” J-J dictionary, but I don’t like it as much as things like 大辞林 and 大辞泉 (another one I have at home) since it lists definitions in their historical order, so you have to wade through a bunch of archaic meanings before you get to what words mean today. (See what lexicon whiz Tom Gally has to say about this in his very informative page on Japanese [国語] dictionaries.) That said, it’s a classic reference and as such it has a place on my shelf, as well as in data form in Logophile.

Some good 漢和辞典. These seem to have fallen by the wayside to a greater extent than anything else in my collection, but I do browse through them from time to time.

The 日本国語大辞典 by Shōgakukan is one I use at the office. I don’t have my own copy because it costs nearly ¥200,000 to assemble all the volumes; that Amazon link is just for volume 1. But this is the Japanese answer to the OED, basically: the biggest out there.

Also in the “have it at the office and lack shelf space for it at home” category is the 日本大百科全書, or Encyclopedia Nipponica. I do have this in data format as well. It came with a Sony electronic dictionary my wife was kind enough to get for me for my birthday some years ago. It is also searchable via Logophile, which makes it very handy indeed.

J-E dictionaries

Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary – This is called the “green goddess” by translators for its cover color; it’s a standard reference. (The E-J version is the “brown behemoth.”) The fifth edition is a fantastic improvement on the fourth and deserves a place on the serious learner’s bookshelf. A CD-ROM version is also available. You can also purchase online access to a frequently updated version.

The New Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary – The best-known of all the 漢英 Japanese resources. This (well, the second revised edition) is the book I used in my university days to pound kanji into my head.

Bungo Manual – This little book is a great one for advanced learners who want to puzzle out the meanings of some older forms in the language. Classical Japanese isn’t something you need to be able to read on a daily basis, but exposure to its forms will help you decipher a lot of the things that you do see in use in Japanese to this day.

A Dictionary of Japanese Food – This slender volume has come in handy a number of times. Nice to have as a general reference when living in Japan, even if you aren’t a translator.

E-E references

Webster’s New World College Dictionary – This is our desk dictionary at the office; that means it decides how we spell things for our publications (unless a client tells us otherwise). We use this in conjunction with the Webster’s New World Speller/Divider, which is a small book with sturdy pages for rapid flipping. A much better choice when you’re proofing a layout and want to quickly confirm a word’s spelling or a hyphenation choice. Perhaps not so useful to people not in the publishing industry, though.

The Chicago Manual of Style – Our house style guide at Japan Echo Inc. It looks like the 16th edition will be coming out later this summer. We have an additional guide about 10 pages long to set down our rules for things not covered in Chicago; many of these match the rules you can find in . . .

Japan Style Sheet – This little style guide is put out by the Society of Writers, Editors, and Translators and is worth owning if you do any writing on Japan.

Other style guides. One major client prefers that we use the Associated Press Stylebook (AP just came out with a new edition that I need to pick up). I also have the Economist and New York Times manuals for my own reading pleasure.

There’s also a handy little book called 和英翻訳データブック put out by the Japan Times. This one, and its predecessor (英文ライターのための和英翻訳ハンドブック), have largely been replaced by the Web when it comes to searching for the official English name of some government department or whatever, but when I’m translating a text that refers to the central bureaucracy as it stood in the 1990s, say, these are lifesavers. If JT ever puts out a new version I’ll likely get it too. Handy little Japan references for translators and reporters.

The history

The journal Japan Echo got its start in 1974. From the beginning it was positioned as a channel for high-quality translations of Japanese views on Japan: at the time the country’s leaders were concerned that the Japanese voice wasn’t reaching the world as it should, and this was one move to help develop a persuasive global presence for the country as a more complex place than simply the home to a bunch of industrious radio and auto manufacturers.

Just as importantly, from the beginning the magazine—and the company producing it—was structured so as to prevent it from being a government mouthpiece. Mochida Takeshi, the firm’s first president, laid down rules that said Japan Echo Inc. would never take on “OBs” from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or other government agencies. This kept the organization from turning into yet another amakudari playground for senior bureaucrats. At the same time, he carved out an editorial stance for the magazine that kept it able to select from the broadest possible range of Japanese journals for its source materials. There were no limits to what could be selected by the (again, governmentally independent) editorial board for translation and publication. (There were other limits in place, though, which I’ll get to in a bit.)

This continued through 2009, and volume 36 of the magazine. Most of our readers during these decades likely obtained their copies courtesy of the Japanese government, as the Foreign Ministry purchased part of our print run and distributed it via Japan’s embassies and consulates to university libraries, government agencies, and researchers all around the world. MOFA was always our largest institutional subscriber in this sense, and our primary source of revenue for the magazine. (In the early years this was synonymous with the company as a whole, but over time we’ve developed a much more diverse set of clients and we make our money translating and publishing stuff for all sorts of public- and private-sector outfits today.)

When the end came, it was due to jigyō shiwake, the Democratic Party of Japan’s process of shaking waste out of public spending on various projects. The DPJ examiners judged that government ministries had no business purchasing magazines in bulk from private publishers. This put an end to the Japanese-language Gaikō Forum as well as our production. Vol. 37, No. 2 of Japan Echo was published in April 2010, bringing the magazine to its end.

You can see more on the magazine’s history and end in the essays from its publisher and editor in chief in the final issue.

What’s changed

Japan Echo Web is online now. Some of us would have preferred an entirely new name for this thing, given its new format, but the powers that be made the choice to keep “Japan Echo” in there. There are still some significant differences between what’s online now and what was once put out on paper, though.

First, it is no longer an independently published journal. This is a Ministry of Foreign Affairs project, as noted on the site’s “about” page. While the editorial board remains mostly the same as before, and we have the same people working on the production side, MOFA has more say over what does and does not go into it. As Shiraishi Takashi writes in his opening comment, “In order to keep the publication from being government propaganda, though the views of the Foreign Ministry are to be considered, the editor in chief is to have final say over the editorial content.” This is no promise that the consideration of MOFA views will be minimal, though. It’s something to watch.

Second, it is no longer drawing on the same source texts. Japanese copyright law states that we have to get permission from the author and publisher of a Japanese article if we want to publish it in English, and while most authors (with a few notable exceptions over the years) love seeing their stuff made available via the web to a global audience, the publishers of the monthly magazines like Bungei Shunjū and Sekai tend to deny permission to publish such translations online. There are a hundred thousand blogs out there written by people who ignore these restrictions, or have no idea that they exist in the first place, but we don’t exactly have the same luxury.

The two major monthlies that are happy to let us translate their articles for online use are Voice (PHP Institute) and Chūō Kōron (Chūō Kōron Shinsha). So you can expect to see articles chosen from their pages, along with interviews we do ourselves and pieces we commission from academics and government officials and so on.

Third, it’s going to be updated more than once every two months. We’ll be posting major articles on a monthly basis, with two months’ worth representing a single “issue” of the journal as before. (And there will in fact be a printed edition of articles selected from the site, published every two months; that will mainly be for MOFA’s own distribution purposes, though, so you won’t see it on the Kinokuniya shelves.) There are also blog entries from members of the editorial board, which we hope to get up on a weekly basis. Not exactly the sort of thing to set your RSS reader on fire, but the translation and editing do take time.

What’s still the same

Japan Echo Web is still translated by the same native-English-speaking translators, checked by the same talented Japanese checkers, and edited with the same care as our print version was. We have the same house style as before, so the voice of this content should be the same as what you know from the magazine days. You don’t get to see my name in there as “senior editor” any more, but it’s still me looking over the texts any number of times before they go out.

And . . . that’s it, really. It’s a whole new ball game other than this. For now we’re still creating this publication, but as our editor in chief notes in his inaugural comment, we won the right to do this in a competitive bidding process that will be repeated each year going forward. Hardly an efficient way to do things—government rules mandate a 40-day period for entrants to prepare their bid packages, and then there are presentations and judging that take place, so you end up losing two months of each year that could be spent preparing an entire magazine’s worth of content instead. We’d love to see this changed to a three- or even five-year contract, but in the present political climate this hardly seems likely.

There are dozens of other little things I could add to this post: All the design decisions that I’m not crazy about but that had to be made for various reasons. The chance that there will be a “Japan Echo” branded publication in the hands of a different company that underbids us for a future annual contract. For the time being, though, we’re live and there’s fresh content to prepare for the big update later this month, so back to work.

Happy reading!

I think back on the days I spent studying Japanese. My copy of Nelson’s open on my desk, a notebook beside it, row after row of handwritten kanji. An article from the satellite edition of the Asahi Shimbun that Professor Gessel photocopied for us and a Kenkyusha dictionary of some sort to dig up new vocabulary.*

In the year 2010, I go look at a website like Lan’dorien’s Mysterious Journey, and it’s like I’m looking at an entirely new foreign language. Stuff I don’t know about (or know about, but have never used) is bolded below:

Next, I need to add the special bonus track jouyou kanji that were just approved. That, however, will be a bit lower priority. (I’ll also be using a simple SRS with the “lazy kanji” method for those. RTK, I feel, has outlived its usefulness after 2000 characters. More on that later though.) First order of business is to go through the core2000 on smart.fm as quickly as possible, and to go through Tae Kim’s grammar deck. Concurrently, I’ll be tackling the graded readers. I’m going to rip the audio CDs and have them playing as part of my mix at work. Which will also consist of normal Japanese podcasts, and also japanesepod101.com podcasts – I think. Those might be superfluous in fairly short order.

There seems to be a pretty vibrant community of people creating these tools and using them to study the language. I don’t think I’ve ever met a truly fluent nonnative communicator who used such things to master Japanese, but this is probably because their era is just beginning. I do wonder whether these new learners are actually saving any time or effort in opting for these methods instead of the old paper books and cramped fingers that I used . . . but this may just be my “get off my lawn” cane-shaking moment.

Best of luck to everyone who’s trying to wrap his or her head around these squiggle characters.

* Uphill, both ways. In the snow. Dammit.

The office is in central Tokyo, handy to Kasumigaseki, Toranomon, and other stations. The work provides good variety, including stuff in the arts and humanities, although the focus tends to be on texts dealing with government, economy, and international relations.

While of course you shouldn’t take anything I write on my personal website as a promise, there’s the possibility of a contract extension in 2011 or even a shift to 正社員 status depending on how much work we see coming down the pipe in the longer term and what we think of the individual’s skills.

If you’re interested, you’ll need to complete the trial translation available on our website [PDF] and send it in with your Japanese-language resume to work@japanecho.co.jp. The resume could be a standard 履歴書 format or something you roll yourself; it will be read by some people here who aren’t translators, though, so we do need it in the language of the land.

Make sure your materials reach us no later than June 15. If you have any questions about the position or the company, you can contact me. Feel free to forward or repost this information. Thanks!

Oog. You know you want this.

The latest health food craze hits Japan’s shores in the form of the available at Lotteria. This bad boy will set you back just ¥160 for the simple cheeseburger, plus an extra ¥100 for each additional patty and cheese slice you add. It goes on sale on June 22, according to the article that told me about the existence of this new threat to Japan’s arteries, and if you want to go straight to the 10-story styscraper pictured here, through July 16 you can get your death fix for just ¥990, down from the ¥1,060 it will set you back thereafter.

American burger chain In ‘n’ Out ran a similar deal (not sure if they still do; I don’t spend a lot of time dining there) some time ago, which gained Internet notoriety when some kids went to Vegas and ordered a 100×100 (that’s patties and slices of cheese). The gory details of that burger, which cost nearly $100, are over here.

I’ve actually been eating hamburgers now and then over the past few weeks. Not McDonald’s, but tastier fare from places up in Yurakucho, which I mean to write about at some point. In my college days I used to spend quality time at Barney’s Hamburgers, with all those options to add avocado and salsa and bacon and who knows what else; these places a short walk from my office offer flavors along those lines. They cost a bit more than the 10-patty Tower Burger, but I think I’d still go for them instead.

UPDATE: Got alerted to another article on the Lotteria offering, with plenty of action photos. An example:

• iPad is out and is looking to be hugely popular. Publishers are very interested in this new channel for content, and 1.5 million titles had already been downloaded via iBooks as of May 7.
• On May 11 a trade association including some 600 Tokyo booksellers announced its intent to sell digital magazine editions for iPad. Sales will begin in June. Major publishers launched an association in late March to begin work on digital publishing; the trend is picking up steam in Japan.
• President Hagino Masaaki of Voyager Japan, Inc., which produces digital pubs, stated in an interview that when his firm created apps for Kōdansha manga titles and submitted them to the iTunes App Store, around 30% of them were rejected for featuring inappropriate content. App reviewers cited prurient content and scenes of violence and gore as reasons the content couldn’t be allowed to reach viewers through an iPhone app.

So far so good. (Or so bad, if you’re a publisher who wants to get involved here, or a reader who wants to get that content on your new iShiny.) But wait! Today a tweet from @rolandkelts alerted me to this news, though.

Here’s why that doesn’t matter: There are still plenty of multi-comic manga apps on the iTunes store, and every one of them is a mobile reader for a scanlation site. All of them.

This piece spins the situation as “why oh why won’t the manga publishers pull their heads out and offer something that’s just as aggressively priced and easy to use,” but the rejection of all those Kōdansha titles points to a low probability that this could be done.*

Maybe at some point Apple will let publishers provide all their content to readers who take responsibility for their own choice of manga titles, boobies and blood and all. But until that day comes, Apple would prefer that you go download something like Manga Rock (still available on the App Store as I post this) and pirate the scanlations of those same titles. Weird, huh.

* EDIT: In app form, anyway. Maybe your favorite manga will all make their appearance in the iBooks channel and you won’t have to worry about the prudish guys in the App Store office with their itchy reject-button fingers. In that case, this becomes just another story about Apple wanting to sanitize the apps you purchase, only tangentially connected to the fact that some of those apps being sold (or offered for free) today connect you to unsanitized—and blatantly pirated—stuff.

The Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on Japanese Studies at the University of Chicago are launching a new annual prize for translations related to Japanese literature and literary studies, broadly defined. Up to three awards will be made each year, and new translations of previously translated works are eligible. Please see the announcement below for details.

To honor their late colleague William F. Sibley, The Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on Japanese Studies of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago have established the William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize in Japanese Literature and Literary Studies.

In keeping with William Sibley’s lifelong devotion to translation and to the place of literature in the classroom, we will offer up to three awards of $2,500 each for the translation from Japanese into English of a work of fiction, poetry, or drama (including screenplays), or scholarship in literary studies, broadly understood. To encourage classroom use and comparative research, we will publish the winning entries on the Center for East Asian Studies website.

Submissions should be on the scale of short story rather than novel, on the one hand, but a body of poetry rather than single poems, on the other. Essays, reportage, and criticism are all genres for consideration. Retranslations of works previously translated, especially of premodern literature, may also be submitted. Each entry should be accompanied by an introduction of no more than 1,000 words presenting the significance of the work in Japan and its potential life in English. The rationale for retranslation should be separately addressed. The translation should be submitted along with the original in triplicate to Chair, Selection Committee, Sibley Memorial Translation Prize, Committee on Japanese Studies, 302 Judd Hall, 5835 S. Kimbark Ave., Chicago, IL 60637.

The competition will be held annually and judged by members of the Committee on Japanese Studies.

The deadline for the first competition is December 1, 2010.

City Poems is the brainchild/retirement project of Victor Keegan, who was a Guardian journalist for 47 years. Keegan, himself a published poet, long ago recognised the potential relationship between poetry and technology—for many years he ran this newspaper’s text-message poetry competition, and his own second collection of poems was published in Second Life. His latest project allows iPhone users to source poems inspired by locations in central London via satellite location; so you could in effect conduct your own poetic tour of the city, following the streets, buildings, statues, buried remains and taverns that inspired the verse.

This seems like the sort of thing that could be done well in Japan. My office is a short walk from the birthplace of Yosano Akiko, for instance; the application could show you some of her verse when you approach the historical plaque on that corner. The whole nation is crisscrossed with travel routes of classical and medieval poets, and dotted with locations boasting rich histories of literary allusion, that could be presented nicely in an app like this.

The big problem is that Softbank’s network coverage is so crappy that if, say, you ride the shinkansen north through Shirakawa, you’ll probably be nearly to Kōriyama by the time your iPhone shows you:

都をば霞とともに立ちしかど秋風ぞ吹く白河の関