I know, I thought there really wasn’t anything left to say about the horrible outfits you daily inflict on the girls of Tsunku’s army, but this is different. It’s a safety issue.

more...

View from the wing provides a handy piece of information (via Marginal Revolution):

Regardless of what you pay and what fare class you’re booking in, your travel on United between San Francisco and Nagoya, Japan is going to have almost no effect whatsoever on United’s decision-making. They’ve got a very large contract with Toyota and they fill up their 747 with cargo and the flight goes out with very low load factors yet is still profitable for them to operate. That’s why the single easiest flight in the entire United system on which to score an international premium class award ticket on is San Francisco- Nagoya...

Never use this.

Step 1: Take the train to Akihabara on a Sunday. Step 2: Pay an American cosplayer $50 for a tour. Step 3: Profit?

At least they advertise it correctly: anyone on this tour will indeed be called “otaku” by the natives…

One of the other students in my reading class brought in the first chapter of the One Piece manga, which we finished a few weeks ago. Towards the end, there’s a scene in the bar where the villain Higuma is laughing with his gang about how pathetic Shanks and his pirates seem to be. One line in particular is noteworthy.

To set the scene properly, the teacher is a rather attractive woman “somewhere past age 30” (coughcough), there are two male students in their early twenties who are big Japanese pop-culture fans, and a basically-bilingual female student who’s about 19. And me, the big hairy over-40 otaku. We were translating as we went, and I had just finished reading the following speech bubble:

酒ぶっかけられても文句一つ言えねェで!!

This loosely translates as, “they didn’t even complain when I threw a drink in his face!”, but before I had a chance to say that, the teacher launched into an explanation of the verb, which she was sure we wouldn’t know: bukkakeru.

All three of us guys were trying hard not to say anything, or look at each other. We just let that one go quietly by…

In the Kino’s Journey short story we’ve been reading in class, the following line appears as Hermes the talking motorcycle is introduced as a “Motorado”:

（注・二輪車。空を飛ばないものだけを指す）

Translated: “Note: two-wheeled vehicle. Refers only to non-flying ones”.

The origin of the word appears to be German: “motorrad”, as in BMW Motorrad, makers of fine motorcycles. All the Japanese search engines I’ve checked turn up lots of links to Kino, followed by a few to generic motorcycle discussions.

So why does the author feel compelled to point out that Hermes can’t fly? I just spotted the exact same phrase while skimming through the first Kino novel, in every story. Where’s the ambiguity? If motorado isn’t in common use in Japanese outside of Kino and motorcycle fans, why stress the fact that Hermes is a non-flying two-wheeler, every time?

After eleven novels, two spinoff novels, an anime series, and two OVAs, isn’t someone who picks up a special-edition Kino book going to be pretty clear about at least the non-flying part? The novels are really short story collections, originally published individually in a magazine, so I can see the first half-dozen or so introducing unfamiliar katakana words like モトラド and パースエイダー, but doing it every time is either an editorial standard or a stylistic choice, and just calling it a “two-wheeled vehicle” is somehow insufficient.

[Update: Replaced the store link; I hadn’t realized that asianmunchies.com was now wholesale-only.]

One of my regrets from the trip to Japan was that I didn’t bring home more ginger-flavored crack(ers). I hoped I’d be able to find them in the US, but the only name I knew to call them by was a Kyoto cliché.

Today, I avoided the con crowd by heading up to SF Japantown, and while browsing through a grocery store, I found two different brands of Shouga Tsumami (“ginger pinch”). They’re a little thicker than the ones we bought in a Gion candy store, and not quite as fresh, but they’re still darn tasty, and they’re available online.

There are several different ways to romanize Japanese. This is the wrong one.

more...

Aozora Bunko is, more or less, the Japanese version of Project Gutenberg. As I’ve mentioned before, they have a simple markup convention to handle phonetic guides and textual notes. The notes can get a bit complicated, referring to obsolete kanji and special formatting, but the phonetic part is simple to parse.

I can easily convert it to my pop-up furigana for online use (which I think is more useful than the real thing at screen resolution), but for my reading class, it would be nice to make real furigana to print out. A while back I started tinkering with using Word’s RTF import for this, but gave up because it was a pain in the ass. Among other problems, the RTF parser is very fragile, and syntax errors can send it off into oblivion.

Tonight, while I was working on something else, I remembered that Word has an allegedly reasonable HTML parser, and IE was the first browser to support the HTML tags for furigana. So I stripped the RTF code out of my script, generated simple HTML, and sent it to Word. Success! Also a spinning beach-ball for a really long time, but only for the first document; once Word loaded whatever cruft it needed, that session would convert subsequent HTML documents quickly. It even obeys simple CSS, so I could set the main font size and line spacing, as well as the furigana size.

Two short Perl scripts: shiftjis2utf8 and aozora-ruby.

[Note that Aozora Bunko actually supplies XHTML versions of their texts with properly-tagged furigana, but they also do some other things to the text that I don’t want to try to import into Word, like replacing references to obsolete kanji with PNG files.]