[Update: turns out she was in the Negima! live-action drama, as the ghost student Sayo. I knew his students would grow up cute.]

Amazon Japan recommended this DVD to me a while back:

Her name is Mai Nishida, and she seems like a nice girl. The Mai/My pun is an old one in Japan, and as for pudding, well, Biyuuden made that one clear in the video for their song Ice Cream & My Pudding (warning: bunny girls!). That one has another pun, writing “ice” as 愛す = “to love”; putting it before a noun makes it an adjective modifying cream…

Back to Mai. The circled text on the front reads 可愛くて柔らかい = “cute and soft”. Not visible is the back-cover blurb, which reads, in part, 大胆ビキニから溢れちゃうぷるぷる揺れるGカップ！ = “completely overflowing from daring bikini, jiggling, swaying G-cups!”.

As I said, she seems like a nice girl. Oh, and she was 19 when this was filmed. Five-foot-two. 35-23-32. Type O. Aries. From Kyoto. Details matter.

Yesterday was Melon Kinenbi’s final concert. Nothing left but the farewell concert DVD in July. I’ve held off on my review of their final album, MELON’S NOT DEAD, largely because the label just released a B-side collection called URA MELON that included a new song and a concert DVD. Given that most of their concert DVDs have been fan-club-only, this was worth picking up, and I timed my Amazon Japan order to include it. So, double review coming soon. [Update! there’s also a new music video on the DVD!]

Pictures from the final concert show a certain still crazy after all these years aesthetic, not surprising after having spent so many years chained in the Hello!Project wardrobe dungeon. They did manage to get out of the goofywear at some point in the show, it looks like.

In memoriam, a fansub group has released performance and interview clips from Utaban, as well as a subbed PV for their 12th single. Amusing, although I do wish the folks at ProjectHello would fix their translation of Saa! Koibito ni narou (“sukima mite” (隙間見て)= “when someone gets the chance to do something”, literally “see an opening”; yes, I’ve told them several times, and Hana even admitted she wasn’t sure about that line, and yet…).

Amusing note from the Utaban videos: they label the girls Sexy (Saitou), Fairy-tale (Murata), Boyish (Ootani), and Natural (Shibata). Personally, I’ll always think of them as Smoky, Quirky, Psycho, and Bambi.

Found in the voting page on engrishfunny.com:

It was posted there because of the odd English translation, of course, but I was more interested in the Japanese: タバコのポイ捨て禁止!, or, for the kana-impaired, “Tabako no poisute kinshi!”.

The interesting bit is poisute, ポイ捨て = “littering”, for a literal translation of “cigarette littering prohibited”. The first half comes from the mimetic adverb poito = “carelessly”; the second half from the verb suteru = “to throw away”. Hadn’t run across poito before.

While looking it up, I came across an amusing loanword: ポイントメーク, pointomeiku. Care to guess the meaning?

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Just some random info:

• If the email doesn't use MIME headers at all, it's almost certainly encoded in Shift-JIS (or, more likely, the Microsoft variant CP-932, also known as Windows-31J).
• If it has a proper Content-Type header with RFC 2047 encoding for the header lines, it's almost certainly encoded in ISO-2022-JP, and your mailer should figure this out correctly.
• ...unless their software encoded the header in Shift-JIS but claimed it was ISO-2022-JP, which I've seen a few times. In one case, the Subject and body were right, but the From header was in Shift-JIS.
• Unicode is still quite rare in Japan, and cellphones in particular will ignore the headers and simply decode the message as if it were ISO-2022-JP. If someone tells you that your email is mojibake (文字化け, literally "character corruption"), force your mailer to set the right encoding. For Apple's Mail.app, the command is:
     defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset ISO-2022-JP
• Oddly enough, most phones will apparently handle raw Shift-JIS; at least, spammers feel comfortable using it.
• If the body encoding is specified, but the headers are not RFC 2047 encoded, then the headers usually are encoded the same, but not always. Mail.app reliably guesses wrong for these.
• Messages are generally formatted for a fixed-width font where most characters are double-width, not just the kanji and kana. Graphics characters and emoticons are quite common, and many messages will look like crap in the wrong sort of font. This also applies to blog entries.
• The EUC-JP encoding basically doesn't exist outside of legacy Unix code and old data files.
• Japanese spam tends to be polite, grammatically correct, and riddled with loanwords.

I was looking up a Japanese word. I knew what it meant. I knew how it had been formed from the parent word. I knew the writer had used it correctly. It just wasn’t in my usual dictionaries, and I wanted to see if there was some nuance to the usage that wasn’t obvious from the construction.

The word was 偉大さ (“idaisa”). Idai by itself is in most dictionaries. As a noun, it means greatness, mightiness, grandeur; as a -na adjective, great, mighty, grand. The -sa ending converts adjectives to nouns, so idaisa should end up with exactly the same meanings as the noun form of idai, but it could emphasize one in particular, or it could simply be more formal. In this case, I think it’s a bit of both; formal, because it’s the foreword to a book about her youth, and emphasizing mighty, because her story is about Ultraman.

But the reason I’m writing is to mention the one dictionary entry that did list idaisa, and included among its meanings a word forged from the purest Scrabbleite:

honorificabilitudinity

Yeah, that helped, thanks.

Please don’t pollute the well. Search results for the writer Masako Bandou return a link to an Amazon US product page for the title “13 of Pornographic Chica Japanese Language Book”. No details, no availability, no hint that the book has ever actually existed. Because it doesn’t.

The actual book sold by Amazon Japan is called “13のエロチカ”, which should properly be translated as “13 Erotic Stories”. The loanword used is “erochika”, which is not the nonexistent hybrid English-Spanish loanword “ero-chica”, but the perfectly ordinary “erotica”. The book even includes French on the title, “13 Histoires Erotiques”, just in case the casual viewer is confused.

The two possibilities are a lazy “self-publisher” using machine translation (of at least the titles) or a used book store that was trying to unload a bunch of used Japanese books, and was ambitious enough to hire someone who had taken a year of Japanese and could mangle the titles into Engrish, but didn’t bother including the ISBNs.

The only good thing I got out of this little adventure was the discovery that a Google image search for the acronym “asin” returns something far more interesting than publishing data.

I’ve been following Mari Yaguchi for some time, starting with her debut in Morning Musume, and I’ve been impressed at how well she’s diversified her career, enough that being kicked out of the band was only a minor setback to her plans for world domination. She’s well-established as an actress, writer, spokesmodel, tv host, and all-purpose talent, and she even still sings occasionally.

Yasutaka Tsutsui is a famous writer and actor, probably best-known in the US for his science fiction novella 時をかける少女 (“The girl who leapt through time”), the basis for the anime film of the same name. Pete and I have been trading notes on his work for a while, starting when he went looking for a short story he’d originally read in Russian. We eventually found the original Japanese version, and last week he sent me a copy, which I finished reading last night.

So what do I find this morning?

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未だ筈は筈の儘 = “mada hazu wa hazu no mama”.

I came across this one quite a while ago, and all my teacher could say about it at the time was that she couldn’t think of a way to explain it in English.