Author: Roy Berman

Bad Japanese to the 4th power times 12

This ultra dorky gaming blog run by some anonymous American nerd has the most hilariously bad Japanese I have ever seen. This is so amazingly ridiculously atrocious that it makes Engrish.com look like Geoffrey Chaucer.

Nintendo は再度上がる! 反抗して準備ができているか。

Nintendo は再度上がる。Nintendo の回転は実施中にある。準備ができているか。考えるものを忘れなさい知っている。賭博の回転のために準備されなさい。液浸の回転! 秘密によってはハリウッドがBroadway に会うところにがある。 第12 力の時4 への10 は見るものである。ない実際はspec シートでしかし。 eMagin は真実を保持する。 Nintendo は再度上がる。 反抗して準備ができているか。
Seriousgamer007 はRedmond に内部にある。私がであるかだれ秘密は残る。 信じなさい 回転は来ている!

SeriousGamer007 は実質及びNintendo の内部にである!

The grammar is honestly so bad that I think the only way to properly convey the effect is to run it through Babelfish.

Nintendo rises for the second time! Opposing, does preparation do? Nintendo rises for the second time. As for the revolution of Nintendo it is in the midst of executing. Does preparation do? Forget those which you think you have known. Prepare for turning the gambling. Revolution of immersion! At the point where Hollywood meets to Broadway depending upon secret bitterly it is. At the time of 12th power 10 to 4 is something which is seen. It is not, but really with the spec seat. EMagin keeps truth. Nintendo rises for the second time. Opposing, does preparation do? As for Seriousgamer007 in Redmond it is inside. Am I or, some secret remains. Believes revolution has come! SeriousGamer007 is inside substance and Nintendo!

He strings together grammatical structures that make no sense together-for ‘immersion’ he uses the word that means literally ‘to immerse something in liquid.’ Gambling? I have no idea. He seems to be trying to say something like “ten to the fourth power times twelve” but instead of actually using the mathematical terms, he just uses the literal words ‘times’ and ‘power,’ enabling the ちんぷんかんぶん that you see before you.

Now, I’m not just making fun of him for writing bad Japanese. Everyone writes stuff just as bad as this in language class. No, it’s not just that it’s bad, but that he clearly thinks he’s so goddamn cool for being enough of an uber-dork to write idiotic nonsense about Japanese videogames in the holy language itself. Even written in English it would have been such fanboyish blather that, after reading it, you might wonder for a second if merely by reading this blog you might be somehow rendering invalid all of the maturity you have developed since the sixth grade. Just look at the kind of blather that he actually DOES write in English.

Thank you for following this blog. This blog has become enormously popular. Gamers from countries all over the world have found this blog. This blog leads the war on gaming dominance for Nintendo.

This blog is at the forefront of that battle. The Nintendo blog to change everything.

This is clearly the guy in your Japanese 101 class who embodies all the stereotypes. His very existence casts a dark cloud over all of us who study Japanese and happen to also enjoy pop culture like video games or manga instead of a strict diet of noh, geisha and zen. In response, I would like to borrow the words of yesterday’s SomethingAwful post.

I would like to take a moment to apologize to the Japanese. The people from the United States and Canada that end up living in your country are almost all horrible and I am really sorry about that. Most Americans don’t really love manga, Pocky and babbling for hours on end about obscure videogame minutiae.

Fan death- seriously?

When I came back from the Philippines it was already cold enough in Taiwan that I needed something to make sitting at the computer a little more palatable. My superthick blanket is enough for sleep, but I decided to pick up an electric heater. Now, I had just read this article on Yahoo Japan, which says that an 82 year old man in Yamagata City has been hospitalized in serious condition to to carbon monoxide poisoning resulting from a loose rubber hose on a Matsushita (aka Panasonic aka National) oil heat-fan. Despite the fact that I was shopping for an electric and not oil heater, I avoided Panasonic products like the plague.

Earlier today, I glanced at Kushibo’s blog and saw this post about fan death, which I’d never heard of before. Fan death is apparently a very silly Korean urban myth that an electric fan can create “a vortex, which sucks the oxygen from the enclosed and sealed room and creates a partial vacuum inside” or possibly “suck all the air away, preventing one from breathing.”

It’s claimed that this legend has spread to surrounding Asian countries, but the closest thing I’ve heard in Japan is that having an electric fan on you at night can make you catch cold, which is the kind of thing that a grandmother in any country might say without sounding like a vortex-phobe. The fact that the Wikipedia page exists only in English and Korean also seems to indicate that it may not have much of a presence in other countries, although I am at least a little surprised that no enterprising Japanese wikinerd has translated the article as fodder for making fun of Koreans.

Another obscure art pioneered in Japan

This is something I spotted in the Wikipedia entry on chicken sexer, which I stumbled across while idly clicking through food related articles after, for some reason, deciding I needed to find out the history of ketchup.

Vent sexing

Vent sexing is not easy. The sexual organs of birds are located within the body; the professional vent sexer has studied their external appearance, which can fall into as many as fifteen basic patterns, and learned to identify which ones are male and which female. Vent sexing is a difficult trade to master; many professional vent sexers are Japanese, where the art originated. The mystery of vent sexing was revealed to the Western world when a seminal paper was published in Japan in 1933 by Professors Masui and Hashimoto, which was soon translated into English under the title Sexing baby chicks. After Masui and Hashimoto’s discovery, interested poultry breeders brought in people who had been trained by them to teach the art, or sent representatives to Japan to learn it. The skill is complex and has been likened to skill at playing chess and other crafts or games where pattern recognition is the key to success.

Appropriately enough, the only other language edition of Wikipedia to include a version of this article is Japanese.

Update: I found a Japanese page that has a photo of a chicken sexer at work.

This academic paper which uses chicken sexing as an example of acquiring subconscious perceptual skills is kind of interesting, and yet dull at the same time.

Upon doing a Google search, I found a great article on a Japanese chicken sexing competition from the 2001 Wall Street Journal archived on some website, which I’ll reproduce below.
Continue reading Another obscure art pioneered in Japan

Ancient Romans proved to be pretty much as you always imagined them

The Discovery Channel website reported a couple of days ago that an interesting piece of ancient Roman pop culture has just been discovered by divers exploring near Durham, England.

Divers exploring a river near a former Roman Empire fort and settlement in Britain have found a piece of pottery that depicts the backside of a rather buff gladiator wielding a whip and wearing nothing but a G-string, according to British researchers.

The image represents the first known depiction of a gladiator in such revealing attire. It adds to the evidence that ancient Romans viewed gladiators not only as fearless warriors, but also as sex symbols.

It seems almost absurd that gladiators weren’t sex symbols. A couple of days ago I posted a link to some fantastic ancient Roman graffitti. Here is what was written about gladiators.

II.7 (gladiator barracks); 8767: Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion.

II.7 (gladiator barracks); 8792: On April 19th, I made bread

II.7 (gladiator barracks); 8792b: Antiochus hung out here with his girlfriend Cithera.

V.5.3 (barracks of the Julian-Claudian gladiators; column in the peristyle); 4289: Celadus the Thracian gladiator is the delight of all the girls

A dream deferred

From the Taipei Times Taiwan Quick Take section.

Academics from China and Taiwan will gather in Taipei next April to discuss ways to promote “exchanges” of the simplified and traditional Chinese characters that are used on each side of the Taiwan Strait. Liao Hsien-hao (廖咸浩), director of Taipei City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, said yesterday that some Chinese academics are calling for “restoring” the use of traditional characters in China since the historical background for adopting the simplified characters has changed. In the face of changes in information technology, he said, both sides should take a practical and scientific attitude toward Chinese characters.

Here’s my idea of a perfect compromise: China brings back simplified traditional characters, and Taiwan adopts the mainland’s Hanyu pinyin system for romanization, and bans all of the various gibberish versions used throughout the ROC.

Asian History Carnival

I don’t normally get into all this blog inter-linking for the sake of linking stuff, but the Asian History Carnival is seriously worth a mention. For those who don’t know, the basic of the blog ‘carnival’ thing is basically just a regular feature, which rotates between different blogs as host, collecting high quality links to blog posts on a certain topic created since the last installment.

The Asian History Carnival was created by the excellent Frog in a Well group history blog (unrelated to this blog), and the second installment was just posted at Muninn.net.
In addition to linking to my post on the ROC English textbook I found, Muninn has collected links to quite a few fascinating pieces on history. I haven’t yet read through more than a couple of them, but I definitely plan to at least skim them all before the set comes along.

Ancient graffitti from Pompei

I love seeing graffitti in different places, and these translations of ancient Roman graffitti found in the ruins of Pompei are both informative and hilarious. Here’s a random selection from around the middle of the page. Isn’t it amazing how much it’s like what you see scrawled on bathroom walls across the globe even today?

VI.14.36 (Bar of Salvius; over a picture of a woman carrying a pitcher of wine and a drinking goblet); 3494: Whoever wants to serve themselves can go on an drink from the sea.

VI.14.37 (Wood-Working Shop of Potitus): 3498: What a lot of tricks you use to deceive, innkeeper. You sell water but drink unmixed wine

VI.14.43 (atrium of a House of the Large Brothel); 1520: Blondie has taught me to hate dark-haired girls. I shall hat them, if I can, but I wouldn’t mind loving them. Pompeian Venus Fisica wrote this.

VI.15.6 (House of Caesius Valens and Herennius Nardus); 4637: Rufus loves Cornelia Hele

VI.16.15 (atrium of the House of Pinarius); 6842: If anyone does not believe in Venus, they should gaze at my girl friend

VII (House of the Tetrastyle Atrium); 2060: Romula hung out here with Staphylus.

Back from the Philippines

After a longish absence from this space, I’m going to resume posting. Although I returned from Manila to Taipei last Thursday at around 5pm, I’ve put off writing anything here for a few extra days to collect my thoughts a bit, and more importantly to do the things I actually had to do here. And there’s another reason. On the evening of my third or fourth day in The Philippines I went to an internet cafe and wrote a fairly long blog post on my initial impressions, which vanished into the ether as the computer crashed at the exact instant I pressed the send button. This occurrence generated a fair amount of both resentment and apprehension, which collectively prevented me from even attempting to post again until I was safely back at my own, stable computer.

First, a brief itinerary.

November 25: 9.30AM flight from Taipei’s Chiang Kai Shek airport to Manila’s international airport. Upon landing I find a payphone to call my friends, quickly tire of the exorbinant rates, and instead buy a SIM card from a nearby vending machine and pop it into my Taiwanese cell phone, giving me a real phone number for my two week stay. This makes my life several times easier. I meet my friends Beth, and later Arlo as well, we have dinner and Beth takes me to an apartelle near both of their homes (University of the Philippines “Teacher’s Village” region, Quezon City, Metro Manila.) The room is scummy but cheap, and the area is fairly nice, as well as quiet and safe.

Following this I spend a few days in Manila (often technically Quezon City, which is part of Metro Manila), sometimes with my friends and sometimes wandering around alone.

December 1: Fly from Manila’s domestic airport (next to the international one) to Iloilo City, where I meet two other friends. Stay the night in a ‘pension house,’ a strangely British sounding term I’ve never encountered before which seems to mean motel.

December 2: With my friend, take a bus from the south to the north end of the island (five hours), and then a ferry from the port to Boracay.

December 4: The reverse of the above trip.

December 5: Afternoon flight back to Manila, meet my two Iloilo friends for lunch first. Instead of returning to the previous Quezon city acommodations, I find the International Youth Hostel listed in Lonely Planet, which is only a few minutes from the airport. This will make my morning trip to the airport the day after next several times simpler.

December 7: Fly back to Taipei.

I know this isn’t the most enthralling travel log, but I have several posts on the Philippines coming up over the next couple of weeks. A few of the topics I plan to post on (some writing, some photos) are:

Magellan’s ignominous end in the Philippines

Filipino Overseas Workers

Japan in the Philippines

Language in the Philippines

The Chinese Cemetary in Manila

Intramuros