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)]

Today’s Japanese slang word is 激ヤバ (“gekiyaba”). 激 means violent or intense, and ヤバ comes from やばい, slang for dangerous, terrible, cool, etc. So, “really bad” or “really good”, depending on the context.

The specific context I found it in was the phrase “激ヤバ援交”, with 援交 (“enkou”) abbreviated from the well-known 援助交際 “enjo kousai” (paid dating, also known as “schoolgirl prostitution”). A quick search on Amazon Japan suggests that in sexual contexts, gekiyaba means “extreme”. So, either the young lady in question was willing to do more than usual, or the resulting video had little or no censorship, or perhaps both.

I started out on an innocent quest: find something short and interesting to prep for the upcoming quarter’s Japanese reading class. I still have some leftovers from Spring (a song and the preface to a biography), but I wanted to try something different. I thought a short travel piece would be nice, and when I was visiting my sister in Chicago, I found a 30-year-old tourist guide in a used-book store. It’s a guide to Kyoto, and judging from the ads, it’s aimed primarily at female travelers.

It’s full of short blurbs about neighborhoods, temples, and shrines, and I picked the section on Arashiyama to scan in and prepare a vocabulary list for. At the bottom of the last page, in small, blue print, I found the following footnote:

直指庵では女の子がジッとダマッテ「想出草」を見て何時間も座っているのです。オソロシー！

Vaguely translated, “At Jikishian Temple, girls stay quiet, look at ‘omoidegusa’, and remain seated for many hours. Dreadful!”

Omoidegusa (想出草) does not appear in any of my dictionaries. Literally translated, it would be “memory grass”, but the third kanji is also used to refer to handwritten notes. Using the Japanese search engine goo.ne.jp, I found a few pages that mentioned it in the context of letters written by women, with a hint of confession.

So I searched Amazon Japan, to see where it might turn up. First thing on the list:

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No, honey; just… no.

(NSFW)

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No comment:

"We wanted to do something that would market augmented reality in a way that's... meaningful. We were like, wouldn't it be awesome if you could look up her skirt, or take off her clothes?"

(via BBG)

Stop, you’re killing me.

Titled "Koisuru Hello Kitty," the play is described as a "school love comedy" that deals with romance and friendship. The main character is a Hello Kitty doll that turns into a human...

There are times when the only joy I can extract from the work of the Hello!Project costume designers is the thought that they’re an aberration, and that outside of Harajuku, most people involved in costume design in Japan at least try to achieve some sort of tasteful enhancement.

Yeah, well, not so much.

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…sort of. So speaks Izumi Kojima, in the song “Ah ~ yokatta”:

There is nothing for us to lose.
Sure, I can say. I can say.
Nobody knows what it means,
"Hung in there!"
But I'll be right beside you from now on.
So on...