Extraordinary Ordinary Guy In Japan

Cross Translation

I often use Babel Fish Translation, the free online translation service by altavista.com. It's very useful but sometimes it shows us the difficulty of translation between Japanese and other languages.
For example, this is my translation of a quote from the essay by Hyakken Uchida.

I'm trying not to read any books since I've gradually tired to read them. Although I had thought that reading is very worthy, interpreting letters one after another, reading line by line, and turning pages are similar to hearing others talk by my eyes and annoying. I feel the eyes are not for seeing such things.

I think it's terrible, but it may better than this by BFT.

Because those where the book is read gradually became troublesome, try not to read if possible. Book-reading, very much like nice thing, however you thought, picking up the letter each one letter, chasing line, turns the page the going, with kind of those which hear the chat of others, with your own eye, is noisy. With those in order to look at such a ones the improbable air does the eye.

Japanese sentences tend to have no subject and we judge them from the contexts. But the translating program always recognizes them as the imperative sentences. And there are many idiomatic expressions in Japanese language, like "chase by eyes" which means reading. The program seems to translate many of them literally.

Then, how about English to Japanese translation? I made a test. I put this sentence from CNN.com into the program and translated it to Japanese.

We have always suspected that man's best friend has a special ability to sense when something is wrong with us, but the first experiment to verify that scientifically has demonstrated that dogs are able to smell cancer.

And I put the result into the program again and translated it back to English. If these translation and counter-translation are done well, the sentence will keep the original meaning. But...

As for us always man' In the close friend of s something us by mistake it is sometime should verify, as for the dog where the cancer darkens scientifically shows the thing which whether there is the first experiment which is felt doubts the special functional thing which a certain thing which.

I finally found out a way to write a funny text! I don't know where the words "mistake" or "darken" came from and why it repeats "which" so many times. I think everyone should play this kind of cross-translation.

For reference, see the following result of English-French-English translation. Compared with the above, this seems to be almost perfect.

We always suspecté that the best friend of man's has a special capacity to feel when something is wrong with us, but the first experiment to be checked which scientifically showed that the dogs can feel cancer.

ASAKUSA

I spent the evening of the last Saturday in Asakusa. Asakusa is a typical downtown area in Tokyo consisting mainly of a huge temple, Senso-ji. ...No, it's not true. Asakusa is no longer a Japanese "typical" town. It has been too well-known by all the tourists especially foreign visitors. The devoted local people are trying the town to be like what foreigners imagine about this country.

The buildings of the temple are lit up by some lighting artist. The souvenir shops on the street are displaying kimonos, paper lanterns, and fake samurai swords. And "rikisha" (human-powered vehicles) are running around there. These things are rarely seen in other places in Japan since they are unnatural for us.

Even so, I don't dislike Asakusa. While walking there, I felt like getting lost in some another Asian city or flashy movie sets.

See also my photos of Asakusa.

Another Rip-off?

His name is Broadband. He is in "Kids Zone" at the website of an US government agency, FCC (Federal Communications Commission).

And he is Doraemon. Perhaps he is the most beloved Japanese manga/anime character. Its manga series was started in 1969 and is one of the most succeeded series in the Japanese character merchandising market.

It's hard to think that the concept of "broadband" had existed before 1969. In short...

I got this information from here (in Japanese). Thank you!

And this page gives you a detailed info about Doraemon.

Geocentric Theory

A shocking news came out.

TOKYO — A survey of 720 students in the fourth to sixth grades at selected Japanese schools showed Monday that around 40% of them said they believe the sun goes around Earth, while nearly 30% were not aware of which direction the sun sets.

The survey conducted by Hidehiko Agata, an associate professor at the National Astronomical Observatory, also revealed that more than 50% of the pupils could not explain why there are phases of the moon. (Kyodo News)

Are they turning back to the 16th century? That's why people believe various fake scientific terms like minus-ion.

The "dropping-out" of students has been a serious problem in Japanese educational scene. The Ministry of Education had not raised the teacher's leadership or quality of teaching methods, but only reduced the contents of curriculum. It's very easy thought and actually the drop-out students are not decreasing.

Originally, Japanese people had respected spiritual things from ancient times. However, we should not neglect to study about science because today we have received much of the benefit from science and technology. People seem to think that the science is a special field and not all the people need to study it. But they accept the pecuniary value of science. So there are also many persons who try to deceive people by pretending their fraud as science.
I think that elementary school is not too early to learn the scientific foundation in order not to be deceived by that kind of fraud. Treating science as a "surplus knowledge" causes Japanese people to be bad at logical thinking.

Mansion Owners Yearn for Europe

Are you still searching for a ridiculous ENGRISH? I'm afraid it's already a thing of the past. The Western culture fanatics in Japan had bored with English words long ago. (even before they learn them...) Now they prefer French, Spanish, German, or Italian, because these languages have been not known well by Japanese people yet.
People had deceived each other by using strange foreign language, English. If you made some useless thing and want to sell it to Japanese people, you should name your product with some vague English word. Any word will do so long as people don't know its meaning. Misspelling? Who cares? Look, people are charmed by the "magic spell", and are waiting in a long queue to buy your useless thing. It's the moment of the birth of the Japanese wacky Engrish.

But, the power of the magic spell has weakened in recent years because the English language has became popular among Japanese people. People feel any stimulations from English words no longer.
So, what should you do to sell your things? It's easy. Use the words of any other language! It works well especially for sales of the expensive things like a house.

Here is my gallery for the name plates of recent Japanese apartments. (We call it 'Mansion' even if it has only one small room.)
Please let me know if you find any mistake in my translation.

La belle étoile
"The beautiful star" in French.



la belle colline
"The beautiful hill" in French.



Il Consolare
"Consoling" in Italian.



Plaire
"Be liked" in French.



el santa fe
"Santa faith" in Spanish.



CASA FELIZ
"Happy house" in Spanish.



maison de Richesse
"House of richness" in French.



VERDE
"Green" in Italian.



viena parterre
"Viena floor" in French.



Le Sillage
"The wake" in French.



SANCTUS
"Holy" in Latin.



CASA FIORE
"House flower" in Italian.



DAS HAUS AM BAHNHOF
"The house at the station" in German.



Sun Duell
Is "duell" from "duel" in German? Does this owner love the spaghetti western movies? Or did he want to say "dwell"?



Alte schloß
I think "Altes Schloß" means "old castle" in German. Is it wrong?



VIOLA
"Violet" in Italian (Or, "Violated" in French!)

Revenge for Engrish

It may be unavoidable to feel some kind of exotic atmosphere for foreign language. This is very paradoxical. If we study the language and can use it like our native language, perhaps we will stop feeling special for it. We are interested in the pronunciations and characters of foreign languages and are moved to use them, just because we don't know their meaning well.
Therefore, we always misspell and misuse foreign words, like a snack named Pokey. And this feeling is not only a Japanese thing. (I know Japan is conspicuous though)

"cafepress.com" is a on-line store which can sell the things that we designed by ourselves, such as t-shirt and mug. Many unique designed products are put on the store and there are also many stuffs designed with Japanese characters. Some of them are quite humorous for us Japanese, and the people who made them must not expect it.

Although the description reads "says meow in Japanese", some characters printed on the shirts don't even seem as Japanese. But when I look hard at it, it can read "It's a hose."

This is so funny. The Japanese top 5 of insulting words are printed on this shirts, but every Japanese must rather laugh than be angry when you say these words to him/her. Because these all expressions are too classical for the recent Japanese people and rarely used today.
I think the #3 word must be a mistake for "CHIN-CHIKU-RIN". It spells like this.

"When you remove frost of my head, we want the donkey body depending upon me!"
Though I could not get any sense from this sentence at first, I found and really enjoyed this humorous article and got its meaning. But the Japanese translation still makes me confused. It says like "According to my mind, I want the donkey body when you take away the frost from my head part".

It's ungrammatical and hard to translate. This says like, "Japanese language be there"... It does not mention where the Japanese language must be or who must let the Japanese language be there. And the more funny thing is the words printed on its back. It does not have a meaning of "Not just a fad", but it says "Nothing". We always say it when we give someone a cold reply.

Who does want this mug which is simply printed "a stupid"?

No! It does not have a meaning of "poison" at all. This kanji says "a fish".

This one realy amused me with its wacky KATAKANA spellings. It says like...
"Metropaltane"
"Spacial Interview!!"
"Danilovic gardenia and sakura." (...what did he want to say?)
"This job is... very fun because... it's not a job."

Game Machine with Phone Function

Japan may be like a theme park for people who love cell phones or other electric gadgets. But, I'm unacquainted to them and always miss the newest stuff. So this subject is not the latest news, too.

Recently, in order to help development of the Java application for cell phones, I borrowed the newest one, N900i. I was surprised that "Dragon Quest" (aka "Dragon Warrior" in US) was pre-installed to the phone. Dragon Quest is the Japanese most popular computer RPG . It was first released for NES in 1986 and 6 sequels are made until now, and total of 20 million or more copies are sold. It contributed much to spread the fun of computer games to people who had been indifferent to them. And I was also crazy about it.
I was impressed that this game, which could be implemented by using full capabilities of NES, was running on the palm-sized cell phone. Then I compared the specs of them.

	Nintendo Entertainment System	NTT DoCoMo N900i
CPU	RP2A03 / 8bit / 1.79MHz	OMAP / 32bit / 200MHz?
RAM	2K bytes for work RAM 2K bytes for video RAM	4.7M bytes for java heap
ROM	32K bytes	100K bytes (max size for "jar" file)
Display	256 x 240 pixels 16 colors	240 x 240 pixels 65,536 colors
Sound	PSG x 3 Noise x 1	64 voices (maximum polyphony)
Dimensions	150mm x 220mm x 60mm	102mm x 48mm x 26mm

This seems to be an absurd comparison... The capability of the present cell phone has easily exceeded the game machine of 21 years ago. Actually, the Japanese biggest mobile company NTT DoCoMo seems to be planning to spread their cell phone as a mobile game platform. Takeshi Natsuno, Managing Director of DoCoMo said about their newest lineup:
"I think that it has a capability which is almost equal to PlayStation 1. I'm sure it's one of the record levels of handheld game machines."
Besides Dragon Quest, the popular games such as "Final Fantasy" and "Resident Evil" are already ported to their cell phones. Until now, playing phone games was only good for killing time. But people will become to check whether their favorite games can be played when they choose their cell phones.

I tried to play Dragon Quest after a long time, but I was frustrated soon. Because the LCD is too small and my eyes got tired immediately.
I guess that the people wearing glasses will continue to increase as we use cell phones.

Do They Know the Meaning of "Kitty"?

When I wrote my last article, I went to Sanrio's website for the first time. And I was made to be totally confused when I read this page (in Japanese). It says:

Charmmy and Sugar, this two, who are charming as their name, are Kitty's pet given by daddy and Daniel!! Kitty has just only started breeding them, but they are already tame and loving her.

And their profile say that Charmmy is a Persian cat and Sugar is a Djungarian hamster.

...Wait a minute!! Hello Kitty itself is...ah... WHAT?

Copycat

I heard that Hello Kitty is now beloved in more than 30 countries, and this is the 30th anniversary year of the birth of Kitty. Great! ...Sorry, I'm not so much interested in it. But I've been wanting to say only one thing about Hello Kitty for these 30 years.



Kitty's design was just a crib from this!!!
This is "Musti" created by the Belgian animator/director Ray Goossens (1924-1998). Musti was started as an animation series on TV in 1968, and its picture books were also published. I read some of that books and loved it in my childhood.
Although it is evident to everybody that Kitty was an imitation of Musti, Sanrio, the publisher of Hello Kitty have not touched on it.

It is said that the total copyright fee for Hello Kitty reaches around 15 billion yen (13.7 million USD) per year, and Sanrio got 23.7 billion yen (21.6 million USD) gross sales in second quarter of 2004. I wonder why they don't feel shady about hiding the fact.
I can say boldly that I stole these images from their official websites!! (Did I say something wrong?)

Fisherman's Profit

There is a Japanese old saying, "a fisherman's profit" which is close in meaning to an English proverb, "fishing in troubled waters". This came from a Chinese story. In ancient China, when a hard clam was opening its shell, a bird flew up and bit the clam's body. The clam closed its shell and pinched the bird's beak. While both were fighting not to detach each other, a fisherman came up and caught the both of them with no difficulties. So this proverb means that if you fight with someone, a third person will take away your profit.

The typhoon No.18 left serious damage in Japanese various places. 44 people died and went missing. One of the national treasure, ITSUKUSHIMA shrine collapsed partially. Industrial damage, such as agricultural and marine products, was also serious.

In a harbor of TOSASHIMIZU City, KOCHI Prefecture, a fish preserve was broken by the typhoon, and 110,000 sea breams escaped to the sea. The neighbouring anglers who heard this rushed for the harbor, and they caught escaped sea breams one after another.
These fishermen made their profit without any efforts, but this happening differs from the meaning of saying "a fisherman's profit". They seem to be much more greedy than the fisherman in the saying.

Reporting Typhoon

Typhoon No.18 is landing the west part of Japan now. This is the seventh typhoon of this year to strike us, and it's the largest number ever recorded. No.18's maximum instantaneous wind speed, 60.2 m/s, is also the maximum record since 1937. I hope we don't get much damage.

By the way, I have a question about the typhoon reports on TV. Why reporters have to report in the middle of heavy rainstorm? They always report almost being blown away by storm and being soaked with rain. Sometimes, their shouts are carried away by the wind and their figures are blurred out through the camera lens with waterdrop.
High wave breaking breakwater and strong wind blowing down roadside trees are shown enough to feel fear through the TV image. But I think reporters don't have to stand into the wind, even by running the risk of their lives. It can be imagined easily that someone will be injured some day soon.
Or are they thinking that it's good opportunity to prove themselves as hard workers who are suitable for the position of anchorman or anchorwoman?

Bamboo

Bamboo trees are seen everywhere in Japan. Small bamboo groves are not unusual even in Tokyo suburbs. There is a bamboo grove also in the back of my apartment. Though the grove is cut down by the janitor in every spring, many bamboos are grown three floor tall until the beginning of fall and their leaves grow thick to make a shade on our veranda.
The speed of growth of bamboo is really amazing. They grow even more than one meter in one day at their peak, and they grow no less than 7 to 8 meter in one year.

Bamboo propagate not only by their seeds but also by lengthening their roots. The roots grow everywhere underground, and occasionally, they are extended 100 meter or more. The buds come out from each node of the root, and each bud grows to be an adult tree in only one year. A lot of small bamboo groves in our neighborhood may all be connected to a single root. Actually, in some farm villages, the field damages caused by the boundless increase of bamboos are at issue.

Bamboo flowers very rarely. In the end of its life cycle, bamboo makes its flowers bloom and scatters its seeds. It is said to be once every 60 to 120 years according to the species. And it is also strange that the bamboos of the same species which live all over the world flower almost simultaneous. About 40 years ago, many MADAKE (Giant timber bamboo) flowerd and died at almost the same time in various countries. Bamboo is the most mysterious plant as far as I know.

As a trivia note, bamboo and rice plants have the same origin. So the people eat rice in every countries where bamboo lives.