I am generally quite careful not to post anything work related on here, but this particular quote from an internal corporate employee survey I’m translating was just too choice, and utterly anonymous and unidentifiable.

I am opposed to foreigners in the front office. Since it is difficult to convey minor nuances of Japanese within the company it must be even more difficult for customers to understand when conversing with them. I have received two whole claims about this.  (One claim said they could not understand what they were saying, and the other said, a foreigner huh? A Japanese would be better.)

For contrast, here is an excerpt from a customer survey from some rich asshole country club in the US that was forwarded to me a few weeks ago.

I am personally upset about the use of the Mexican labor on the golf
course. I understand you have contracted, and it is the contractors
who are responsible for hiring, but the club is responsible for hiring
the contractor. We get letters about “responsibility” and “right and
wrong,” well, I think the club management had better look at itself.
If all these workers are legal, then I will apologize, but I very much
doubt they are legal. This is a very poor example of judgment and
sends the wrong message. I know I am not the only one that thinks like
this, and if my concerns are unfounded, then the club should issue an
explanation and correct the image.

It’s well worth remembering that there is a certain extent of xenophobia in any country, and I believe that suffering from it firsthand when traveling or living abroad-such as the minor (or major in some unfortunate cases) annoyances that many of us have experiences in places like Japan-is actually a rather good learning experience, which can make one more sensitive to despicable attitudes back home that one may have overlooked before.

If you look at Sino-Japanese text printed in the Chinese Song or Japanese Mincho typeface (similar to serif typefaces in European languages), you’ll notice that the horizontal strokes in characters are much thinner than the vertical strokes. Here’s why:

The printing press appeared in China during the Song Dynasty. At the time, each print block contained two portrait-oriented pages placed side by side. The print blocks were all cut from rectangular planks such that the wood grain ran horizontally. Because the grain ran horizontally, it was fairly easy to carve patterns with the grain, like horizontal strokes. However, carving vertical or slanted patterns was difficult because those patterns intersect with the grain and very easily break. This resulted in a typeface that has thin horizontal strokes and thick vertical strokes. To prevent wear and tear, the ending of horizontal strokes are also thickened. These design forces resulted in the current Song typeface.

It’s not pretty, but I’ve made my Google Notebook public, so MF readers can keep track of what’s been in front of my eyeballs recently, such as Hakuho’s upcoming promotion to Yokozuna and an analyst’s description of Dentsu’s attempts to leverage its near-monopoly of TV ads to dominate the Internet market as well.

Midtown law firm looking for Japanese/English bilingual college graduate with good writing & communication skills both in Japanese and English. No experience necessary. Send resume in English to Barst & Mukamal LLP, 2 Park Ave. 19th FL, New York, NY 10016 ATTN: Mr. Ben Goshi.

(craigslist)

Don’t say I never gave you anything.

I sifted through each individual web site of Japan’s lawmakers (members of the Diet) and placed any RSS feeds I found into Google Reader. Compared to the 722 seats in the Diet, only I only picked up 150 individual members with feeds.

That doesn’t mean Japan’s politicians are not active on the web. All but about 10 or so (mostly the elderly and entrenched – like “Don of the Upper House “Mikio Aoki” – or just too cool for the web – like our man Koizumi) had websites (another 10 members’ sites were down for various reasons), about 90% of them kept up-to-date content on the site, and a good majority provide a wealth of content either in the form of opinions or activities reports. There is, perhaps, a downside to that – they aren’t spending their time drafting legislation (in many cases the job of the PM’s office or autonomous bureaucrats). What I am saying, however, is that most of them are behind the times – lots of websites with early-2000s site designs, and one member even had a Geocities page!

But that aside, here are the links to the RSS feeds that were available, broken down by cameral and party affiliation (Click the party link to see the aggregator site):

Lower House (House of Representatives) (480 seats total; 114 feeds)

Liberal Democratic Party (295 seats as of 10/22/2006; 62 feeds)

New Komeito (31 seats, in a coalition with LDP to form ruling coalition; 3 feeds)

Democratic Party of Japan (113 seats; 43 feeds)

Japan Communist Party (9 seats; no feeds, but here’s their sweet English-language site)

Social Democratic Party (7 seats; 3 feeds)

Minor parties/unaffiliated (total 25 seats, includes Kokumin Shinto (New People’s Party, 4 seats) and Shinto Nippon (New Nippon Party, 1 seat); 3 feeds total)

Upper House (242 seats; 37 feeds)

Liberal Democratic Party (112 seats; 12 feeds)

New Komeito (24 seats; 6 feeds)

Democratic Party of Japan (80 seats; 19 feeds)

Japan Communist Party (9 seats; no feeds)

Social Democratic Party (6 seats; no feeds)

That’s 151 feeds, or about 21% of the members (this isn’t an exact total – one member had multiple feeds, of which I subscribed to 2). How is this useful? Well, not at all if you don’t read Japanese. But at least I will be checking back on it whenever I want to see what people are saying on a given issue, possibly keeping it updated after elections, but who knows? I was bored.

Now, it is possible that I missed a member’s feed for reasons including not seeing the link or it not actually being linked on the member’s official site. Also, a good percentages of the feeds I did find came after digging through the settings page of members’ “e-mail magazine” services, chiefly mag2. Also, many members had “blogs,” but either used primitive Japanese “diary” software, manually updated the sites the old school way, or simply didn’t offer a feed.
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Thanks to Momus, I have discovered this sweet Japanese video site, Qoogle. It works like Digg to pick up popular videos on Youtube.

Highlight: The first episode of Doraemon. As a big Doraemon fan this is pretty sweet, complete with the lame music. And Giant’s voice is different somehow.

Mainichi is a wonderful thing, as this passage demonstrates:

Take the Shigurechausu, or time of thin rain and tea. This is a position where the woman gets on top. If the woman shifts to her side while riding atop the man, the position turns into the goshoguruma, or ox-drawn cart like those used by ancient royalty. If you’re both looking in the same direction while being sideways, that is, insertion from the rear while both are lying side-on, it’s called the mado no tsuki, or moon window. Turning the woman in the opposite direction gives you the Tsubame Kaeshi, or inverted swallow (as in the bird)...

I wonder if they’re hiring translators. It might be worth dropping out of law school.

It’s hard to talk like a pirate in Japanese, but the best alternative is to talk like a samurai. Here are five phrases to get you started. Main point: Say “gozaru” a lot.