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.]

[This quarter, I’m taking a class that’s focused on reading authentic Japanese text. Everyone finds something short to read, makes copies for the entire group, and prepares a vocabulary list. Well, we’re supposed to be making vocabulary lists, although so far I’m the only one to do so. Two of the pieces I’ve brought in have been from illustrated books, and it seemed wasteful to photocopy the whole things, so I typed them in and added some furigana.

The first one wasn’t really authentic Japanese, being from the ASK reader series, but the teacher really liked that author and wanted us to read it. The second is more contemporary, and I thought it might be of general interest. It’s the latest short story from the Kino’s Journey series. I’m just posting the first scene, since it’s both illegal and darn rude to reprint the whole thing. If you like the story, buy the book, which also includes a DVD of the second Kino movie.

I’ve added a lot more pop-up furigana (with English translations) than I need myself, to give more people a chance to work through it.]

more...

[Update: Ah, almost none of them (besides the obvious) are loanwords; the drawn-out vowels and -ra ending are apparently Edokko slang]

[Update: I feel a little better, after getting email back from my Japanese teacher that read, “I don’t know what they’re saying, either.”]

Lyrics to the b-side from the latest single release by Melon Kinenbi. I didn’t have much trouble with the Japanese part, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out half of the loanwords they’ve worked in.

顔がダメ　会話がダメ
タイプじゃない　ピンと来ない
合コンもこの頃マンネリ

私には時間がない
回り道してられない
違ったら次を探さなきゃ

賞味期限って何よ！
私はまだ旬よ！
大人の女

パスよ　パス　チェンジ　あり得ない
坊や帰って寝んねしな
ハスッパ　ゲロンパ　バレテーラ　それが何？
パスよ　パス　チェンジ　聞こえたの？
よい子じゃ物足りない
ペロっと　ガンターれ　オンナザカリ

あれもダメ　これもダメって
わがままは女の権利
花の命は短いのよ

流した涙の数は 未来の幸せの数
怯まないで前に進みましょ

白馬の王子様
そんなの戯言だわ
クールな女

パスよ　パス　チェンジ　繰り返す
こんなはずじゃないでしょ
サラッと　スリット　しけテーラ　現実は
パスよ　パス　チェンジ　ごめんなさい
妥協は許されない
チュチュッと　バローレ　オンナザカリ

賞味期限って何よ！
私はまだ旬よ！
大人の女

パスよ　パス　チェンジ　あり得ない
坊や帰って寝んねしな
ハスッパ　ゲロンパ　バレテーラ　それが何？
パスよ　パス　チェンジ　聞こえたの？
よい子じゃ物足りない
ペロっと　ガンターれ　オンナザカリ
ペロっと　ガンターれ　オンナザカリ

I just finished chapter one of the first 魔法戦士リウイ novels, in Japanese.

[Pardon my shouting: I just read thirty pages of Japanese prose written for a native audience!! Ahem.]

The anime adaptation opened with the experienced adventuring team of Genie (amazon warrior), Melissa (priestess of the war god Mylee), and Merrill (thief) finding a magically-sealed door in a ruin. They headed to town to recruit a mage, preferably female, but the only one that seemed interested was Louie, a brawny goofball who had already “rescued” Genie from a fight and pantsed Merrill while being chased by a mob of angry women. Later, he accidentally blew up a bar trying to prove himself to them, and then while being chased by a mob of angry priestesses, destroyed the roof of Mylee’s temple with his magic, inadvertently revealing himself to the (naked) Melissa as the hero her god had chosen for her to serve. By the end of the first episode, Louie was firmly established as a drunk, a womanizer, a careless street brawler, and a terrible student, with no real interest in or aptitude for magic.

The novel starts out a bit differently. Louie is being congratulated by his classmates for finally mastering enough magic to earn his mage staff, making him the fifth to succeed out of the hundred apprentices that their class had started with ten years earlier. The next day, the others are all nursing a hangover from the party, but Louie cheerfully heads off to the entertainment district in pursuit of wine, women, and trouble. The sound of a tavern brawl draws him in from a distance, and he pushes through a crowd of onlookers to find two apprentice knights fighting three women (guess who?), and the women are wiping the floor with them.

more...

This quote comes from the cover of an adult magazine, so I’m not kidding about the lack of worksafeness.

more...

Asami Konno joined Morning Musume as a baby-faced 14-year-old, and after five years, put her career on hold to go to college. She later decided that she could balance the two, performing occasionally while giving priority to her studies, but in the interim, she had the chance to do something that must have been the envy of all her friends:

more...

After the second time she was caught behaving like a typical girl her age, Hello!Project broke Ai Kago’s contract, and she dropped out of sight. Apart from an alleged sighting in New York City and the claim that her mother would pose nude for a photobook, she’s managed to stay invisible for the past year.

…until yesterday, when a six-part interview started appearing on a Japanese news site, which was promptly pounded into the ground by the traffic. Her new publicist has also created a stub of a fan club site, promising real content soon.

Naturally, Hello!Online is all over this one.

1. Pizza Hut's new meat pasta is pretty good. I'll be eating it for another two days, since they only deliver a family-size portion with breadsticks, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
2. I always thought the name "Rune Soldier" was an invention of the team who translated the anime for the US market, since "Magic Soldier Louie" sounded too similar to "Magic Knight Rayearth" and similar series. Nope, page six of the first novel glosses 魔法戦士 as ルーンソルジャー. Pity, really, since the change ruined a decent joke in episode 18.
3. Constructs of the form AたるB, where both A and B are nouns, are a bit of grammar that's hard to find a good explanation for in English. Historically, there were three different conjugations for adjectives, but for the most part only the -i and -na types still exist; there are only a handful of true -taru adjectives in modern Japanese. This does not stop people from occasionally attaching -taru to a noun to make an "A-looking B" or "A-like B" expression.
4. Speaking of -taru adjectives, I find this one charming: 死屍累々. Shishiruirui, it's like the "que sera sera" of carnage. I don't think I'll ever be able to sing the correct lyrics to that song again.
5. Speaking of songs we'll never be able to sing correctly again...
6. Nobody ever told me that Pixel Maritan had a webcomic.
7. On a vaguely related note, the trading figures for Moe yo! Tank School are, um, interesting.
8. And while we're following dirty links at Amazon Japan, I can see where the artist was going with this covergirl from MC Akushizu ("the hyper bishoujo military magazine"), but, anatomically speaking, he made a wrong turn.