Much thanks to the Duck for his review of this film, which led me to include the DVD in my latest order from Amazon Japan. I was able to find a set of soft-subs for it that seem to be reasonably accurate (and were apparently used to subtitle the bootleg DVDs that people were selling on Amazon US for a while). It’s a gorgeous, ugly, moving, and quite sad film, and Joe Hisiashi’s score suits the material perfectly.

The few non-Duck English reviews I’ve found come at it with an axe to grind, making them basically useless for evaluating the film. Oddly, they all seem to think that no one outside of Japan would be interested, which says more about them than it does about the film.

It’s not available on BluRay, but the image quality is still superb (Handbrake ripped it at 850x364). Sample screengrab below, from late in the film.

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After some of my earlier searches, I’m not surprised that Amazon Japan occasionally recommends porn novels to me. Today’s top dirty book has an interesting title, 一発やりがい.

一発 means “one shot”, either literally, like one (1) bullet, or more generally, like a knockout punch; やりがい means “(s.t.) is worth doing”. In context, the phrase would seem to map cleanly to:

"I'd hit that"

Risako: “I made it quite clear that we were wearing black tonight. Your disobedience is most disappointing.”

Momoko: “Please allow me to punish her next, Mistress.”

Saki: “That cow would never have caught me if this drapery wasn’t so heavy.”

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I’m quite fond of the work of South Korean singer Younha. My interest started when someone brought one of her songs in for our Japanese reading class, but I eventually went on to pick up her Korean albums as well (which were much cheaper than their Japanese equivalents). This morning, I was listening to some tracks from Peace Love & Ice Cream, and found myself thinking:

"I can't wait until she releases these in Japanese, so I can understand the lyrics."

(amusingly, the title track is a cover of a song recorded in English by Dutch artist Sandy Dane; I think they even used the same backing track (Sandy Dane, Younha), although the lyrics are apparently quite different)

Over at Celestia’s place, she commented that she had the day off and not even her Japanese co-workers knew precisely what the holiday was. This led to the discovery of two rather intriguing clauses in the law governing national holidays:

国民の休日

Kokumin no Kyuujitsu, "national holiday", defined as a weekday between two holidays. (this year, the day between Respect The Elderly Day and the Fall Equinox)

振替休日

Furikae Kyuujitsu, "transfer holiday", defined as the first non-holiday weekday following a holiday that fell on a Sunday. (this year, Constitution Memorial Day was a Sunday, but the next two days were already holidays (Green Day and Children's Day), so Wednesday became a holiday)

Given the state of California’s finances, I had my fingers crossed that my usually-small Japanese reading class would survive the inevitable cuts, but it turns out it was canceled for an unexpected reason: high enrollment in other classes in the department. There’s a contractual limit in how much one instructor can support, and my class was taught by the only salaried professor. Her time is already paid for, but each part-time instructor is a new cost.

Not sure what’s going to happen next quarter. Enrollment typically drops significantly in Winter and Spring quarters, as students discover that Japanese is the wrong language to study if you’re just trying to meet the language requirement to transfer into a four-year school, but that may not be enough to reinstate the class. She’s going to try to restructure it as an online class, but I’m not sure how it would work out. The group dynamics are a large part of what made it work, with people bringing in a wide variety of material and working together to understand it, with her guidance and cultural insight.

And I had some really fun stuff prepped for this quarter, too…

Decpihering loanwords in Japanese can be a bit of a challenge. Today’s example is アン・ドゥ・トロワ, an-du-torowa. I don’t think I’d have gotten it if I hadn’t found a video clip of a song by that name.

If you’re on a Unicode-based OS, and you’re trying to read something encoded in Shift-JIS, and you’re getting errors about a small number of illegal characters that can’t be converted to Unicode in an otherwise perfectly-reasonable file, it’s not Shift-JIS, it’s CP932.

Windows Code Page 932 includes mappings for characters like 〝 and 〟, which do not exist in S-JIS.

…and that’s another hour of my life that I want back.

[Update: the luit conversion tool in X11 supports Shift-JIS only, and silently discards CP932 extensions. I’m not sure what else is available for Linux users; I just do it with a Perl one-liner.]

[oh, and there’s yet another name for this encoding: Windows-31J. And there are several other incompatible variants of Shift-JIS that require guesswork on the part of the decoder, making the continued resistance to Unicode frankly baffling. (except for not-very-smartphones, where hardware and software limits have made support for multiple encodings tricky)]