Japan
...and three weeks later, we celebrate my other birthday
When I was reading the star-crossed-puppy-love story 野菊の墓, I found myself wondering if the editors at Ask had over-simplified the main conflict, since it boiled down to “you two can never, ever marry, because she’s two years older”. Skimming through the original version (a much slower read, even though it’s easier to look up vocabulary with cut-and-paste), it looks like that really is the reason the whole village is upset about their budding romance, to the point that she’s forced into an unhappy marriage with someone else. Pause for mild culture shock.
One thing that caught my eye, though, was this passage:
僕は小学校を卒業したばかりで十五歳、月を数えると十三歳何ヶ月という頃、民子は十七だけれどそれも生れが晩《おそ》いから、十五と少しにしかならない。
Roughly: “Having just finished elementary school, I was 15, or if you counted months, 13 and some change; Tamiko was 17, but since she was born late, she had just turned 15.” [note the use of Aozora Bunko’s 《》 convention for furigana, in this case glossing the character for “evening” with the word for “late”]
The Ask version just gave their ages as 13 and 15, respectively, but clearly there was something going on in the original. I noted the multiple ages as something to look into later, and then spotted the answer by accident while flipping through my collection of reference books: 数え年. In the kazoedoshi system, you’re 1 at birth, and gain a year on New Year’s Day. These days, the most visible use of this system is probably the Shichi-Go-San festival.
With little effort, one can manage to enumerate no less than three levels
In deference to Brian’s delicate sensibilities, I will not use the phrase “…on SO many levels”.
Merosu, Serinuntiusu, and Dionisu-ou in Shirakusu
I’ve now read all ten of the books in level 3 of Ask’s graded readers, and six of the ten books in level 4. I’ve also discovered (by reading the front cover…) that they didn’t just record audio for some of the stories; they did it for everything, but the ones that were too long were left off the CD and put online as MP3 files. That gives me a total of eight hours of professionally-recorded audio of stories that I’ve read and understood.
Mostly understood, anyway. I had a little trouble with the basic premise of 野菊の墓, which is that Our Hero’s first love can never be his, because she’s two years his senior. It’s possible Ask’s version has been over-simplified a tad, so I’m going to attempt to read the real thing at Aozora Bunko, a free online library of Japanese literature.
Another one I had some trouble with was called 走れメロス, not so much because of the story as the basic problem of figuring out who the heck these people are in this tale of ancient Girishia. Quite literally, it’s all Greek to me.
One thing I found interesting at Aozora Bunko was their method of encoding furigana in a text file. A string of kanji characters is glossed by following it with hiragana surrounded by double angle brackets. If the glossed word immediately follows another kanji that isn’t covered by the furigana, a vertical-bar character is added to separate it.
So, the title of the first story would be rendered as 「野菊《のぎく》の墓《はか》」, and if I only wanted to add furigana to a single word in an all-kanji phrase, it would look like this: 「東京｜特許《とっきょ》許可局」. They also include annotations of the form ［#whatever］ (mostly for rare kanji and special formatting). All of the characters are full-width forms that line up neatly with kanji, but aren’t otherwise used in Japanese prose. I don’t know if this is a common standard, but it seems to be sufficient for most uses.
Autumn-colored canal in Kyoto
I was playing with the new version of Aperture today, flipping through the pictures from my Japan trip, and noticed something unusual. See if you can spot it.
Dear Ai Suma,
You’re a fresh, pretty young girl, and I’m sure you have a bright career ahead of you in the idol business.
Seriously, if you weren’t still on the dangerous side of sixteen, you’d already be breaking my heart.
However, there’s something very important that you need to know about your career: you work for Hello!Project, and where other talent agencies are content with using up fresh, pretty young girls as if they were tissue paper, H!P takes a more comprehensive approach to destroying souls. Just ask fellow member Risa Niigaki:
Free Kanji fonts!
Safari 3.1 has added CSS downloadable font support, so I went looking for some decent fonts with less ambiguous availability than the often-linked hgrskp.ttf. To my surprise and delight, I found that Epson hosts a free download of a nice collection of fonts, including a Kaisho, a Kyoukasho, a Gyosho, a Mincho, and a Maru.
The only thing wrong with them is that the embedded font names are not encoded in Unicode (probably Shift-JIS), so the names show up as garbage in font menus. Easy fix with a font editor.
[Note: kanji fonts are in the neighborhood of 50 times larger than a standard font, and you really, really don’t want to embed them into a web page except as a test. There’s a reason Adobe PDF uses font subsetting, and I suspect people will insist on similar tools for web fonts, even the standard ones. Also, Safari 3.1 doesn’t cache downloaded fonts at all…]
