Review: Say hello to the new Don　外国人から見た新登場丼

Ｂｅｅｆ　Ｂｏｗｌ
私はお正月ごろ日本に行ってきた。久しぶりに牛丼が食べたいのに、牛丼がないところで行ったのは非常に残念だったが、新しい丼は思ったよりまずくなかった。食べて見たものをここで（英語で）評価する。
Hey guys. As some of you may know, I took a short trip to Japan this New Year’s. As a few more of you may know, I was giddy with anticipation of the new menu items available at the donburi chains. In the two weeks I was there I managed to squeeze in quite a few bowls, so for those of you who are away from the action I will review them here.

But first, some background: donburi (丼) are a dish served in Japan consisting of rice on the bottom and (usually) meat topping on the top. Not sure what the origin of the modern donburi came from, but the most popular one is gyudon (牛丼）, or beef bowl. Gyudon are so popular, in fact, that there were about 4 major chains in Japan who sold nothing but: Matsuya, Sukiya, Nakau, and the venerable Yoshinoya, whose logo looks like this:
Yoshinoya

Now, those of you who haven’t lived in Japan or didn’t venture far outside their gaijin bubble while they were there might not realize just why Yoshinoya and their ilk are so important to Japanese consumer culture. But those of us in the know are fully aware that there are approximately three types of regular customers at Yoshinoya: truck drivers, male college students, and gaijin like me who have no money. What is the draw? It’s CHEAP BEEF! 24 HOURS A DAY! Beef in Japan is fucking expensive, but you could get a good meal at Yoshinoya without buying and preparing it yourself for a mere 250 yen. It’s a good, cheap meal if you are drunk at 3am or are simply too broke and don’t want to eat natto to survive.
Continue reading Review: Say hello to the new Don　外国人から見た新登場丼

Kim Jong Il Profile – from Japanese Manga

KJI Profile English

I just translated this amusing manga profile of Kim Jong Il. It was passed on to me by Curzon, but neither one of us is sure of the original source. If anyone knows what it’s from, please email me or leave a comment. Japanese readers are encouraged to check out the manga Kim Jong Il Introduction (金正日入門）, which was itself translated from Korean, but not being a Korean reader I’m unable to provide any information on the original version. Avaliable here at Amazon Japan, and the second volume here.

This panel is not from either of those books, but if you like it then you’ll like them.

Untranslated version is in the full post.
Continue reading Kim Jong Il Profile – from Japanese Manga

Resurrection Burial Tomb

Over the weekend I have a small project translating a patent application from Japanese to English. Quite naturally, I went to the USPTO online database to look up some patents and get a better idea of the appropriate terminology, when I stumbled across this patent. Being extremely long, incoherent and mad I’ll just quote the abstract and a sample from the beginning of the main text.

A Resurrection Burial Tomb includes a means to preserve and revive Human Beings and provide power and power systems for the same, comprising of a container of preservation means, holding the suspended dead person’s body and connected to electrical and energy apparatus systems contained in the Resurrection tomb and robotic machine workers that help maintain and work to revive the suspended Huamn Being; wherein the process provides power and security from death to living Human Beings being useful and novel, producing a less savage empowered child culture and machine parents.

I the Reverend Daniel Robert Izzo, hereby claim the, “A Resurrection Burial Tomb” that is a novel means to revive a dead person’s body from the grave; and providing a 1 little more security from an impending death; will preserve and prevent the human body from decay and will prolong the human life and tissue and return it into a conscious state, together with the means do do the same, and a means to produce energy, to do the same; comprising of: an artificial womb and a container with fluid having a crystal radio crown and antenna that connects to a radio and energy devices; wherein the deceased person is prevented from decay within said container and where energy is obtained from the radio crown that oscillates into the desceased person’s nerves and brain and the entire contianer is within a building and tomb that is weather tight, wherein a nuclear device is used to generate electric energy and heat energy; wherein part of the dead person’s bone is converted into a microprocessor and computer; wherein the computer and energy sources, drive a heart lung machine that keeps the dead person’s remaining cell tissue alive, together with an artificial heart assistor pump; wherein the deceased person’s bone will regain consciousness, using the material of their bone and artificial and organic means cosisting of human bone material; that is convertable into a computer and microprocessor, organically grown body parts; artificailly grown body parts; nerves a muscles

Yes, I cut it off in mid-sentence. Amazingly, this one sentence, constituting the first claim of the patent, is over 4000 words long.

Homemade Les Miserables 2d Fighter

My friend Matt passed on a link to this amateur 2d fighting game based on Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables. The game is being distributed as freeware, so go ahead and download it. It was built using the first edition of a fighting game design program called 2D Fighting School (2D格闘スクール), published by the Japanese media company Enterbrain. The product info page for the newer 2nd edition product is avaliable here.

Since I’ve never seen or read Le Miserables, Matt supplied me with this summary-

Valjean is a former felon, trying to stay out of trouble. Marius and Enjorlas are french revolutionaries, Javert is a police inspector (and Valjean’s former warden), Thenardier is a crook, Cosette is Valjean’s daughter, and Eponine is Thenardier’s daughter.

I’m still trying to figure out how Ponpon the car-driving rabbit and the ki-fireball throwing French policeman fit into the story. I guess I’ll have to read the book.

Continue reading Homemade Les Miserables 2d Fighter

The Japanese Web 2004

Pride
It’s a little late for 2004 retrospectives, but I thought you guys might enjoy taking a look at what was hot on the web in Japan for 2004. First, the Google Zeitgeist, Google’s yearly ranking of the top search queries in each field, gives an idea of what was popular way back then. I do wish they’d give more detailed and constant statistics instead of just this little bit at the end of the year.

The #4 search query in Japan was 翻訳 (translation), nowhere to be found in any of the other top 10s that I can see. Are Japanese people more interested in learning about the rest of the world? Or is it that they just suck at English???

In a surprise upset, goth singer gackt beat out Bae Yong Joon (The silent-but-deadly Yong-sama) for most searched for man. And despite being kind of off the cultural radar this year (I think?), folk duo Yuzu popped up at #5. Kind of like how Kurt Cobain is STILL the #10 most sought-after image in America.

Next we have Yahoo!JAPAN‘s Web of the Year 2004. There was an ad in my Yahoo!JAPAN e-mail telling me to vote for it, and when I saw the nominees it was surprising how many websites I had never heard of. The list here should be a useful guide to all the most popular and trusted web sites in Japan.

Yahoo seems to have won a good portion of the awards, so who knows how impartial this thing was. But it’s possible that since it was hosted by Yahoo, the people voting already know about Yahoo and its services.

The top “Zeitgeist award” (話題賞） was 電車男　(Train Man), the romantic novel lifted directly from 2ch message boards. I really want to read this, so I have no idea why I didn’t buy it when I was in the country. Anyone coming to DC from Japan, buy it and I promise I’ll pay you back!

Anyway, I’ll leave the rest of it for you to draw your own conclusions. I’ll be using it to check out the links I wasn’t aware of, and I’ll get back to you with some highlights.

Fuck Zapan! Korean Anti-Japanese Rap Song

DJ Doc
UPDATE: Now you can listen to “Fuck Zapan” in all its “glory” by downloading it from us here! Here‘s a link to just the lyrics.

UPDATE II: The song isn’t actually by DJ DOC, or so I’ve heard.

Hot on the heels of Korean-language classic “Fucking USA” comes “Fuck Japan” from the Korean rap group DJ Doc. This was #1 on the charts in South Korea circa 1999 (?) and was allegedly made in response to an anti-Korean song made by a Japanese rap group. Full of simpering calls of “Hai!” (Yes, sir! in Japanese) and depictions of foolish Japanese who don’t know their own history, this dubious masterpiece is punctuated in the middle by a sample from the PC game Starcraft (a personal favorite and a HUGE hit in Korea), proving that it is truly a product of the ROK. You can listen to it and get a Japanese translation of the lyrics here. Here are the lyrics in English:

I am Korean! (I am a Japanese!)
Hey, you, try saying “Al lo byu!” (I rob you!) *1
No! It’s “I low byoo!” (I rob you!)
Are you retarded? Can’t you even pronounce that? (Hai!)
Are you really retarded? (Hai!)
Isn’t your country just fundamentally retarded? (Hai!)
Hai! It’s your Korean boy! Fuck these pigfoot Japs! *2
Let’s kill them, boy! Fuck! These penis-face pussies motherfuckers!
Those fucking Japs that live in Japan penis-face pussy Jap bitch retard idiot bitches!
You who have been described as ‘barbarians to the East’ *3 pigfoot bitches!
Are you going to lie about your own history?! (Hai!) Go ahead and lie, you deceitful pigfeet!
Pussies! How much will you lie, pigfeet?! Keep on lying, Japs!
Lie to your mom and dad! Lie to your mom and dad!
Will you eat your mom? (Hai!) Is that OK? Yeah, that’s fine! That’s just fine!
Retard bitches! Go and have a seizure! Continue reading Fuck Zapan! Korean Anti-Japanese Rap Song

Racist Hot 97 Skit Mocking Tsunami Victims

I seem to be a couple of days late noticing this, but when listening to last week’s episode of the WBAI hacker radio show Off The Hook on my mp3 player earlier today I heard a segment on an extremely parody song produced by an NYC area radio station. Now, New York may not quite be my home city, but it is my home radio market, and I was pretty shocked that a prominent commercial radio station thought that they could get away with such outright racism on the public airwaves, especially in a city like New York with such a large Asian population.

This post on hiphopmusic.com has some general info, and also linked to this mp3 of the song, preceded by a conversation between one of the co-hosts of the show (who is apparently Asian) trying to explain that she had declined to join in this skit because she had found it offensive, and then being yelled at by the host for “not doing the job the way it needs to be done cuz you have a different agenda,” and “You always want to act like you’re separate. If you want to be separate, be separate. Why not go all the way then?”

For the last week Hot 97 has been running a hideously unfunny and offensive skit named “Tsunami Song,” that ridicules the victims of the Tsunami as “ch*nks” whose children will now be sold into child slavery. It’s being played on the station’s morning show, hosted by Miss Jones.

NOTE: If you use the word “tsunami” in your email it will probably get filtered now, and not read. So try to leave that word out..

HOT 97
395 Hudson St. 7th Fl.
New York, NY 10014

(212) 229-9797

hot97@hot97.com

Or even better, Hot 97’s parent company Emmis broadcasting:

ir@emmis.com
jsmulyan@emmis.com
rcummings@emmis.com
jsteele@emmis.com
khealey@emmis.com

Here are the lyrics to the Tsunami Song

“There was a time, when the sun was shining bright
So I went down to the beach to catch me a tan.
Then the next thing I knew, a wave 20 feet high
Came and washed your whole country away.
And all at once, you can hear the screaming chinks.
And no one was saved from the wave.
There were Africans drowning, little Chinamen swept away.
You can hear God laughing, ‘Swim you bitches swim.’

[Chorus]
“So now you’re screwed. It’s the tsunami,
You better run and kiss your ass away. Go find your mommy.
I just saw her float by, a tree went through her head.
And now your children will be sold. Child slavery.”

I should also mention that, aside from being morally repugnant, this is some of the worst singing I have ever heard outside of karaoke.

Asian Media Watch also has a report on this, located here, which includes quite a bit more information, including ways to contact the radio station. They also discuss filing a complaint with the FCC, but I personally feel that this is the wrong approach. A number of advertisers have canceled the contracts with Hot 97, and they’ve probably also lost a fair number of listeners. I would rather see Emmis Communications punished by the market than by the government.

The Non-formation of Intellectual Individuals at the Root of Society’s Fragility

お正月ごろに日本に遊びに行ったら、なぜか日本の週間雑誌にハマってしまって何冊もアメリカに持って帰った。ココで英訳するのは、東洋経済で見つけた北大の教授による「戦後６０周年の日本はどうすればよいのか」についてのオピニオンである。日本語の原稿はこちら。彼もWordPressで作ったブログを持っているらしい。さすが。この英訳記事をもとに僕らの存在をしらせようと思う。

OK, back to real posts. This opinion piece from Toyo Keizai (E. Asian Economy) Magazine comes a bit late, but it’s a very thought-out leftist stance that I have yet to see in the English language. Here you go:

by Yamaguchi Jiro (Professor, Hokkaido Univ.)　← Wow, it looks like he’s got a WordPress blog! Cool! And here‘s the Japanese original of this article:

The politics of 2005 have already begun. This year there are few major elections, save for the Tokyo Assembly, and it is predicted that there will be little change in Japan’s political situation. Quite the contrary, with the 60th anniversary of the end of WW2, we should perhaps make 2005 the year in which we recap how far Japan has come since the war and further the debate on Japan’s future path.

Looking back at the 50th anniversary of the war’s end 10 years ago, we must acknowledge a huge difference in the international environment and domestic opinion. 10 years ago, Murayama Tomiichi, then chairmnan of the Japan Socialist Party, had the Prime Minister’s seat, and public opinion displayed reflection over the past half-century along with a sense of atonement with the victims of the War. Furthermore, Japan bent over backward to achieve resolution on various pending issues, such as aid for “comfort women” and reconciliation ceremonies with the various countries in Asia via PM Murayama’s 50th Anniversary talks.

However, 10 years later, the Japanese public overflows with the exact opposite sentiment, as shown in their distrust of surrounding countries and their dissatisfaction with being made the villain of modern history. The PM is visiting Yasukuni Shrine, and plenty of people support him. And as Japanese-American military cooperation deepens, we have gone so far as to send SDF troops all the way to the Middle East. The postwar framework of the SDF and security has been dismantled, and Article 9 of the Constitution has already lost its significance as a norm. And in the case of the Japanese hostages in Iraq, the opinion that those who oppose the government’s policies deserve to die reached all the way to parts of the mass media. Continue reading The Non-formation of Intellectual Individuals at the Root of Society’s Fragility

REPOST: My reply to FG flames

Enjoy. This is a continuation of the discussion on the TokyoDV boards. I figured I said enough for people who don’t give a shit about some flame war to get a kick out of it as well:

It’s funny, I was totally wrong about why FG exceeded its bandwidth (didn’t know about the Tsunami-induced traffic surge), but I get all the flak over something I’m more or less right about.

It doesn’t take some genius or seasoned Japan expert to get an impression of what some website is all about. All it requires is a few months (if that) of watching the posts.

I don’t know what the selection process is for front-page articles on FG is, but they are available in an RSS feed (how I get them) and in that sense can be taken as if they were a collaborative blog. You’d have to be a fool not to realize that the point of posting articles on a website is to entertain, inform and maybe get the scoop faster than the other guys. Continue reading REPOST: My reply to FG flames

The True Story of the Hello Kitty Vibrator

When I went to study in Japan I had to field a lot of strange questions and requests from people. One of the most asked-for souvenirs was the infamous Hello Kitty Vibrator.
Kitty-chan Vibe
When my cousin came to visit we even went looking for one- but we never found it. And now, thanks to the Asian Sex Gazette, I finally know why. Finally, I can sleep at night.

The emergence of the Hello Kitty vibrator as a cult adult item caused friction between Sanrio and Genyo, and Sanrio ordered the company to stop making the units. Genyo refused, since it had paid a lot of money to license Kitty for their products. There seemed nothing Sanrio could do, since they had approved the item for sale (see the official Sanrio sticker on the boxes). The answer came when the Japanese tax authorities raided Genyo on suspicion of tax evasion. It seems that some creative accounting was going on between the president of the company, a Mr. Nakamura, his vice president, and the owner of the factory in China where the units were made. All three were arrested, and Sanrio had the excuse needed to yank Genyo’s license. They seized the molds used to make the vibrators and destroyed them.

Extra: Everyone should check out the picture Curzon posted in the comments section.