Peter writes about Takarazuka, a theater company in Japan consisting only of women which dates back to 1914. It's sort of the mirror image of Kabuki, in which all parts, nominally male or female, are played by men. In Takarazuka, all parts are played by women.
As I was reading about it, what it reminded me of was the Imperial Opera Troupe in Sakura Wars. And about the way that Kana and Maria tended to play male characters in it.
I wonder if the real-life Takarazuka was one of the inspirations for the game, and the anime derived from it?
More seriously, there were a lot of jokes around the original production, which used the original voice actresses (Sakura Taisen being, after all, a franchise that lives and dies by its VAs). Iris's VA is taller than Kanna's, if I'm not mistaken...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at September 22, 2009 11:13 PM (vGfoR)
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I've got a number of the Sakura Taisen live shows on DVD (not the Takarazuka stuff, but some of the dozens with the games voice cast), and pretty much everyone was taller than Kanna's VA. Probably blogged about it at some point three years or so ago, but they are absolutely hilarious, and only partially for the right reasons.
Posted by: DiGiKerot at September 23, 2009 09:11 AM (RzYJk)
I don't really care how tall Tanaka is. I still respect her enormously. And I think she's kind of unsung in terms of how successful she's been in the industry. I bet she's recorded more half hour shows than even Koyasu. She's done about nine hundred just as Krillin and Luffy.
How many seiyuu have been as continuously employed for as long as she has? More than twenty years, folks. (DB started in 1986.) No one gets that much work without being damned good at what she does. And she is, too; she's one hell of an actress.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that she's the all-time champ for total episodes worked.
Right now, between the DBK re-recording and her ongoing work on One Piece, she's busy as hell. Two eps a week most weeks, and in One Piece she's the starring role.
But I do see how it would be funny to watch the cast of Sakura Wars.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 23, 2009 11:50 AM (+rSRq)
Pete seems peripherally involved in an exchange program with Japanese students coming to visit UNM. He says:
Just as I was afraid they would, Japanese and American students completely segregated themselves and do not talk at all, with one notable exception of American boys who chase Japanese girls.
Which is not exactly unexpected. What I think is interesting is that the converse doesn't seem to be true (or at least not noteworthy): where are the Japanese boys chasing American girls?
It kind of shows some of the deep cultural differences between the countries, doesn't it?
UPDATE: I misunderstood Pete's post. He tells me this is in Japan, not in New Mexico. The visitors are Americans. I think that makes things a lot more clear, and a lot more understandable. The Japanese guys are not chasing American girls because there are lots of Japanese girls around.
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Several years ago we had a Japanese exchange student stay at our house. One day he was looking through one of my USMA yearbooks and stopped at a page with a black cadet on it. He asked if Blacks wee allowed to go to USMA. The question kind of stopped me in my tracks. I explained to him that anyone who meets the qualifications has an opportunity to go. Cultural differences indeed.
Posted by: schaumannk at September 20, 2009 10:46 AM (npu+U)
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There is a reason for this. About a year ago I read an article about a research which dealt with the dating habits of people. At the end, they concluded that men don't care at all about race and are willing to date anybody who is "acceptable". But women dated differently. Blacks preferred blacks, latinos latinos, whites whites, etc. I other words, they discriminated against races not their own. There was only one exception to this: oriental women didn't discriminate against white men.
I believe this is the reason why I see so many white-guy/oriental-girl couples including my own.
Vilmos
Posted by: vilmos at September 20, 2009 11:21 AM (9ilg8)
I suspect that a significant reason for the asymmetry (e.g. lots more "American man, Japanese woman" couples than the other way around) has to do with which cultures tend to be male-dominated.
America is a lot more egalitarian in terms of relationships between the sexes than countries such as Japan and China, which are still very male-dominated. A Japanese man would think nothing of just lifting his cup and saying "Tea!" and expecting the woman to scurry away to fill the order... but try that with an American woman and you do so at your peril.
So, not to put too fine a point on it-- if a Japanese is considering dating an American, then a Japanese woman gets a better deal (from her perspective), but a Japanese man gets a worse one (from his). The Japanese woman is more likely to get a man who will treat her as an equal... but many attitudes of a Japanese man would stick in an American woman's craw.
Obviously that's a broad generalization, and there are exceptions; certainly there exist considerate, egalitarian, and cosmopolitan Asian men, and there are successful couples who don't follow this pattern. But in the aggregate, I suspect that such issues go a long way to explaining the disparity.
Posted by: snark at September 20, 2009 12:25 PM (w47od)
SchaumannK, deep down Japan is very racist. Most Americans don't notice it, though, because mostly they're not racist about Americans and Australians. (That being who the Japanese consider to mainly be who defeated them in WWII.) But when it comes to Koreans, or Filipinos, watch out! (And there are lots of stories of Filipina maids and nannies being mistreated.)
There is an awareness of this. We went through 40 years of consciousness raising here to try to eliminate bigotry and it's been pretty successful. The job isn't finished and won't be until there's an entire turn-over of the population, but bigotry is on the run and in decline. Japan has been trying to do the same.
Someone I know told me that when he first went to Japan, he learned a certain word to use to refer to Koreans. Maybe ten years later he went back, and casually used that word (which he thought was normal) and the person he was talking to blanched and told him he should never ever use that word. He didn't tell me what word it was (and I confess I'm curious) but I gather this was something like the word nigger which at one time was usual and common and is now utterly verboten in polite company. So progress is being made.
But they're not as far along as we are.
Snark, I think your point is very well taken. I'm sure that's a factor.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 20, 2009 01:30 PM (+rSRq)
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After studying this situation close up over the last 25 years, and seeing relationships built both ways, I agree with snark 100%. I think the point he makes is by far the most significant reason the white male-Japanese female relationships are much more common, and are more often successful. And I'll take it one step further--it works the other way as well. Japanese women often have personality characteristics that make them "a better deal" for white males than white females, thus making it a win-win situation for both of them. And it flips for the Japanese man-white female pairing--probably neither are going to get what they want. One more issue that has come up when I've talked to people about this is that white men generally find Japanese women attractive, while white women are not so hot on Japanese men. Basically, the dice are heavily loaded in favor of the white men-Japanese women pairing. This reality has actually been called "racist" by some people I've met. One often hears the accusation that the white male simply wants a compliant "geeesha girl" and is taking advantage of the Japanese woman. Such a statement strikes me as representing real racism.
Koreans in Japan have a tough road. A friend of mine over there comes from a very wealthy Korean dynasty (heavy industry) and his branch of the family has been in Japan four generations, but they still are not allowed to become citizens or get a Japanese passport. He had a relationship with a girl from Kyoto, whose family is semi-aristocratic and the two of them fought both their families for almost 15 years to get married. It was finally allowed only on the condition he be "adopted" into her family line and take their name, completely abandoning his Korean roots.
Every once in a while some pressure group will fight to have certain words declared verboten in Japan. Not too long ago, "chibi" was on the chopping block. That campaign doesn't seem to have done very well.
By far the largest and most troublesome form of "racism" in Japan is the continuing mistreatment of the burakumin (decendents of the eta, or "untouchables" of the Edo Period). It's amazingly well-hidden but once you get a look behind the curtain it's a huge problem.
Posted by: Toren at September 20, 2009 04:20 PM (0LOh+)
About the Burakumin, I was thinking of mentioning them. That's pretty scandalous, and it really runs deep and is wide spread. I gather that a lot of the Burakumin "pass", or at least try to.
I saw a poll which said that the majority of Japanese would divorce their spouses if they learned that they were Burakumin.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 20, 2009 05:35 PM (+rSRq)
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> white men generally find Japanese women attractive
And possibly all orient women.
When I came to the US in 1990 as a 24 years old guy from Eastern Europe (where the girls are pretty), I was stunned how, how to say it nicely, unfeminine the young American white women were (several non-US females agreed with me). Most of them wore t-shirts and shorts (a university town in Florida) and just let their hair grow with a minimal haircut. After a while whenever I saw a feminine white woman, I always thought "well, a foreigner".
Well, feminism definitely changed the women here in the US. Question is for the better or for the worse... Whenever I think about how many orient-girl/white-guy pairs are, I always think about how much this is due to the natural attraction or to feminism.
No wonder I ended up with an orient girl and haven't looked back since then.
After having lived in Taiwan for around 18 months, I agree with snark with the possible exception that this is not a Japanese-only but probably an orient-wide issue.
Vilmos
Posted by: vilmos at September 20, 2009 08:04 PM (9ilg8)
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I said as far back as high school, that I'd probably not marry an American girl, because they were too "noisy" and foreign girls were "quieter." (I think that's how I put it)
Of course, for various reasons, I ended up not marrying at all -- at least I stuck to my guns, eh?
Posted by: ubu at September 20, 2009 08:27 PM (kL7KW)
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Several years back, a married friend of mine was working in Japan for A Large Company, and he often had female Japanese co-workers ask him if he knew any nice single men in the US. They wanted to get married, just not to Japanese men.
As for the burakumin, my understanding of the current situation is that what makes it difficult to "pass" is the fact that the paperwork you have to present to landlords, employers, etc clearly shows where you were born, and there's an officially-illegal but widely-distributed book identifying burakumin neighborhoods.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at September 20, 2009 09:12 PM (2XtN5)
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Japan is far from the only place exporting desperate brides. The advantage of a Japanese bride is that, on average, the probablity that she'd dump you the moment she receives her certificate of citizenship is far lower than such of her competitors from Russia, Iran, Poland, or Vietnam. Of course careful vetting and wide net are always advisable, but at certain point you have to rely on luck. You cannot look inside their craniums.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at September 21, 2009 12:20 PM (/ppBw)
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Well, yes, because the Japanese bride isn't usually economically desperate. She's not marrying to leave Japan, she's leaving Japan to marry.
My Ukrainian sister-in-law wasn't a mail-order bride, but her older sister was, and managed to eventually get the rest of the family into the US.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at September 21, 2009 03:47 PM (9Nz6c)
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BTW, there's a guy in my anime club who was married to a Japanese woman for 18 years, and a couple of years back she decided that she had enough and went back home, leaving their son in his care.
Oh and also: Christmas Cake.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at September 21, 2009 04:10 PM (/ppBw)
While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus. It was a very beautiful place and it was really green
It is like hell green. We have seen pictures of the surface sent back by the Venera landers, and the surface of Venus gives Hell a run for its money as a terrible place to visit. (None of the landers survived 12 hours after they were down.) It's hot enough to melt lead on the surface of Venus. The atmospheric pressure is 90 times that of Earth.
There's nothing alive on Venus and there never will be.
The party leader met his wife - a former musical actress who was born to Japanese parents in Shanghai - while he studying at Stanford in the United States.
1
The Venera landers were some pretty impressive feats of engineering. Getting any technology to work in that environment, let alone 60's-era cameras and radio transmitters, is an amazing achievement.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 04, 2009 12:06 AM (PiXy!)
A senior Diet member involved in a discussion on piracy in the
waters off Somalia (the DPJ generally opposes any dispatch of Japanese
forces overseas) famously had this to say earlier in the year:
“Well, I have seen ‘pirates’ in manga, but I don’t
really get it. Have there really been any instances of pirates
attacking Japanese ships?â€
This politician, Kenji Hirata, is currently the secretary-general of the DPJ.
Yay Japan.
Posted by: Toren at September 04, 2009 03:24 AM (yi9EM)
I have a feeling that the Japanese voters will regret voting into power the DPJ very, very soon.
And of course, the moment Tom Cruise's name came up in the first lady's comments, was the moment it established her as Cloud Cuckoo Lander...
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at September 04, 2009 03:48 AM (wTC14)
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I'm not sure there'll *never* be anything alive on Venus. . . but thats just because I'm sure someday, somebody will have the temptation to try and terraform the thing, or at least launch some microbes to the place to hopefully prep it for eventual terraforming someday.
Lord knows its just about the worst place in the solar system to place any kind of human habitation.
Posted by: metaphysician at September 04, 2009 05:36 AM (M5Kik)
Hah. I re-read that article in the Telegraph just now, and spotted this: "Mr Hatoyama is due to be voted in as prime minister on September 16 after his party defeated the iron grip of the Liberal Democratic Party after more than five decades of near-interrupted power. "
ORLY?
Yes, I know it's just a typo.
Posted by: RickC at September 04, 2009 05:56 AM (gdTgE)
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THE LIE IS EXPOSED!!!! JAPAN IS GOING TO REMOVE THE VEIL OF COVERUPS AND FRAUD...VENUS IS A LUSH JUNGLE PARAdise populatedwith d1nosaurs Burroughs knew..he was there! THEY ALSO CAN HaS MAJIKS THAT CAN REDUCE the melting point ofd steel to the same temerature as fire...and SWITCH nirth certificates...The antarctic space nazis and the reptoids even now fight over its lush greenery while we are led to believe that it is not habitable but we mudst learn becausde whoever wins will take venus as their own and then cause a pole shift on the earth the earth with the Mayan theramin in 2012 and we will all be fed upon or enslasved by the Dero if we dont listen to people like Miyuki Hatoyama and Tom cruise.
(Oh and SRSLY....Black Lagoon was an NHK documentary...teh pirates really are 3 Americans and a disgruntled Japanese salaryman with Stockholm syndrome. )
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at September 04, 2009 08:07 AM (EaQN7)
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I know what you're all thinking, and I have nothing to do with Brickmuppet's derangement. I'm innocent, innocent, I tell you!
Posted by: ubu at September 04, 2009 08:51 AM (i7ZAU)
Since the Telegraph did not get to the quote about Tom Cruise, and Toren has already posted an excerpt from Sankaku Complex, here is the link to the article about Japan's new First Lady, along with the original source:
I actually did do a little bit of basic math to see if it would be possible to suspend a sky-city over the tops of the sulfuric acid clouds of Venus, maybe a zeppelin design involving envelopes full of hydrogen extracted from the sulfuric acid.
Pretty much ended up being "not likely at all." The atmospheric pressure and temperature above the acid clouds are such that any known material capable of containing the hydrogen for any length of time would be too heavy to successfully enclose a large enough volume to remain buoyant; the break-even point was about 10km below the cloud tops. Interestingly, within that zone the temperature and pressure would actually be suitable for relatively lightly protected humans to survive (about 1/2 atm and 80°F), but even glass or wax would gradually be eaten through by the acid, and all water would have to be imported.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian at September 04, 2009 01:58 PM (TaHHC)
I received a rather odd unsolicited email this morning.
I found your webpage very interesting. can you please tell me about the original english word for these borrowed japanese words?
The email address was hotmail and the user name was strange, sounded middle eastern or something. It has the flavor of one of the weird comment spams going around. But it seemed to be genuine, and so I answered it.
What it mostly consisted of was japanized versions of English. Here's the list, plus what I said about each:
Ooba [kooto] -- no idea kakuteirudoresu -- cocktail dress hitto -- hit geemo setto -- "game" and "set" naisu iin -- "naisu" is "nice" shiidii -- no idea jazuusesshun -- jazz session uetto na kanji -- I don't think that's borrowed from English dorai -- probably "dry" goo sutoppu -- that would be "go" and "stop" kaa -- no idea wanman-kaa -- no idea takushi -- no idea
So that's what I mailed back. For a lot of these, what you have to do is to read them out loud a few times and then use your imagination. That's how I got "cocktail dress".
1
shiidii -- That seems to be "CD" (though there's no di in Japanese, so it should be shiijii) kaa -- sounds like "car" wanman-kaa -- "one-man car"? takushi -- sounds like "taxi"
Posted by: Jaked at August 19, 2009 01:29 PM (0gBEJ)
"shiidii" (シーディー) is CD. Also, as a note to Jaked, the (ディ) katakana compound with the small イ is generally used to represent an actual "di" sound. That's how CD is spelled in katakana, and most Japanese people pronounce it that way, so saying there is "no di in Japanese" is a somewhat misleading statement.
"wanmankaa" (ワンマンカー) is "one-man car". This refers to a bus or a train with only one employee - the driver, who also acts as the ticket collector or conductor.
in "uetto na kanji" (ウエットãªæ„Ÿã˜ï¼‰ is an English loanword, "wet". Although I can't be entirely certain without context, the most likely interpretation is the phrase "a wet feeling" or "wet sensation".
"ooba kooto" (オーãƒã‚³ãƒ¼ãƒˆï¼Ÿï¼‰ I haven't heard before, but it could be "overcoat".
Posted by: 0rion at August 19, 2009 02:29 PM (4qQat)
Oh, yeah, I know about that, but in my experience, and I mean, at least with all the Japanese I've encountered they always pronounce it as ji instead of di. I guess it's due being so accustomed to it. (Thinking about it, there's no di I can remember on anime either, but then again I haven't watched any recent ones or the old ones that do pronounce it, if they do exist. I'm guessing they don't but if they can as you say I wonder if they have guidelines as to how to dub anime in Japan)
Overcoat -- that sounds much better but I wonder about the brackets "[]" around kooto.
Posted by: Jaked at August 19, 2009 02:40 PM (0gBEJ)
5
I will forward those to my correspondent. Thank you for your help!
6
Sorry for the off-topic, just wanted to point out that since yesterday morning has been the same pic up there of Aria the Animation's girl on pink, one-piece swmsuit. Got nothing against it (quite cool actually) but doesn't the pic up there changes like every hour or something?
Posted by: Jaked at August 20, 2009 12:55 PM (0gBEJ)
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Try to get some context for each one. Like have him use it in a sentence,
Posted by: Veeshir at August 20, 2009 01:07 PM (TmAo9)
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Jaked, yes it does, and yes it has been. Try clearing your browser cache. (Right now it's a picture of one of the twins from Negima!?)
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The thing is, I noticed it not because of my desktop but because it "happened" in several computers at my college throughout yesterday and today. I guess I just had some weird luck then.
Posted by: Jaked at August 20, 2009 08:59 PM (JlFye)
Ooba Kooto is the new show by Production IG about the Oboe player and the Koto player who, practice together, become an eclectic musical hit, tour the world and fight crime.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at August 21, 2009 12:04 AM (9ha+4)
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"Naisu In" appears to be used to compliment a golfer: "nice in". There's also at least one "Nice Inn" hotel in Japan.
"Uetto-na kanji" shows up on fashion sites to describe "wet-look" hairstyles (as opposed to "dorai"). There are other uses I didn't track down.
"Goo sutoppu" is a Korean card game, whose rules include a continue/stop condition.
"geemu setto" is from tennis: "game and set".
-j
Posted by: J Greely at August 21, 2009 12:47 AM (2XtN5)
Two of my favorite web resources for doing Japanese language lookups have gone offline. One has been gone for two weeks; the other for a couple of days. And between them it's left me crippled.
The second, in particular, since it was how I tended to look up kanji I didn't know (which is to say, nearly all of them). So I'm thinking I need to buy something.
The requirement here is that it permit me to cut-and-paste to this web site. Which means it can't be one of those nifty stand-alone electronic dictionaries. And it can't be paper. It's got to run under Vista.
I just started doing some googling. Anyone know anything about this Declan package? I think I'd feel more confident about it if the screen caps of the program showed that it spelled the word "radical" correctly.
It's only $16; maybe I should just go for it anyway.
Most of the cheap offline tools just repackage the JMDICT or EDICT data, and they tend to grab it once and never update. Declan did something else, though, because that link says it has only 23,000 words, which is less than a $5 paper dictionary. JMDICT has about 165,000, and the site also gives you all the supplementary dictionaries, which includes ~700,000 names.
If you want to try something free that picks up fresh data occasionally, take a look at Stardict.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at July 11, 2009 11:45 AM (2XtN5)
They also say that you can request an upgrade to the dictionary for free. What I suspect is that there's a way of downloading the standard EDICT file and using it.
I'll take a look at that one. (And I didn't know about the mirrors!)
Also, I don't know if you use Firefox at all, but there's an extension called "Rikaichan" which, when turned on, allows you to hover over Japanese text on web pages and it will provide readings and translations (it's not very good with names I've found, however).
Posted by: Jessi at July 11, 2009 01:13 PM (Xt7yj)
Jessi, I just downloaded that. While I don't really need a Japanese word processor, the kanji radical lookup appears to be idential to the one I was using online.
Today's word is 駄々ã£å dadakko. It means "spoiled brat".
I first noticed it in Negima Ala Alba. Ayaka has a tantrum at a summer festival, screaming and crying, and Konoka and Setsuna both say that word. (After which Ayaka glares at them.)
But it was also the answer to a question I've had for a long time. In the last few episodes of Nanoha A's, when Nanoha is fighting against
the Book of Darkness she is talking to Lindy and says something nasty about her enemy. They translated it as "a whiner" and I was curious what word was used in Japanese. Today when I listened to it I picked out dadakko.
I suddenly had the urge to watch Nanoha A's again. In the third episode when Vita and Fate are fighting, Vita thinks, "I only have two cartridges left." And what she says is nihatsu.
I got curious; just what does the hatsu counter word mean? Off to Wikipedia, where we learn:
hatsu, patsu (発) Gunshots, bullets, aerial fireworks; orgasms, sex acts
Holy shit!
UPDATE: You know, I am tempted to download a fansub of this series. For one thing, there's a chance there's one in higher resolution. For another, I am thoroughly tired of the way that Geneon's DVD mastering guy crippled the encode by leaving out the timing track. What a pain in the ass.
Probably a waste of time, though; I just looked at the only one I found is almost certain a rip of the Geneon DVDs. I could do that for myself; I don't need their help.
Maybe I will. That's what I bought CloneDVDmobile for, after all. The sound for the first three eps would still be mono, but my player controls would work with the rips.
UPDATE: You know what? I'm going to do it. Another thing is that my DVD drive has a hard time loading the second DVD. I usually have to pop it and reinsert it several times before it successfully registers.
UPDATE: Well, that sucks. CloneDVDmobile will rip it if I choose the English soundtrack, but it barfs on the Japanese soundtrack. "ffmpeg" doesn't like it.
I just recently installed the new version of that program; maybe I need to retreat to the older version.
UPDATE: Ripping to a new VOB file didn't crash, and the file plays, but the subtitles didn't come through. Sheesh.
UPDATE: All of that was using version 1.6.0.1 of CloneDVDmobile, a recently-released upgrade. I just uninstalled it and reinstalled the previous version I have, 1.2.0.1. And it handles it fine. I've sent an email to SlySoft reporting the problem.
It still isn't a marvelous solution, though. With the settings I was using, it hardsubbed it. I'm going to experiment with it a bit more and see if I can figure out any way to get a reasonable softsub. My guess: "no". Unfortunately, H.264 MKV doesn't appear to be a format it knows how to generate.
I guess that's because they didn't want to include an OCR package. The subtitles on a DVD aren't stored as a text stream, they're effectively a 2-bit GIF file with one color reserved for transparency. Looks like what the program did was to merge the subtitle graphics with the base video:
That's a framegrab from DVD playback
And that's what it looked like on the resulting AVI file.
I found a program one time which would convert the subtitles on a DVD into a text file. The way it worked was that it knew how to parse character divisions, and it relied on the fact that the subtitle overlay is computer generated and uses a single font of a consistent size. Which means that every time a particular character appears, it'll always look the same. Every time it found a character it hadn't previously seen, it displayed it on the screen and waiting for the user to type in what it was. It wasn't as inconvenient as it sounds. But that was three computers ago.
UPDATE: I'll be darned; I still have it. It's called "SubRip" and my version is 1.17.1. There's got to be a newer version out there somewhere!
UPDATE: Yup, 1.50 beta 4. But the author's home page is gone, so that's the last we'll get.
It looks like a legit edit from a student of Japanese and linguistics, but it would be nice to know where he picked it up. My guess would be one of his professors at University of Hawaii, since he did that on at least one other occasion. He doesn't strike me as the type to put something he heard from another student into Wikipedia.
Or it could be, y'know, personal research, in which case, ãŒã‚“ã°ã£ã¦ã€ãƒ€ãƒ‹ã‚¨ãƒ«ã•ã‚“ï¼
-j
Posted by: J Greely at June 19, 2009 07:59 PM (2XtN5)
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Actually, it's even more plausible than that: 発 is used in many "coming out of" words: publishing, launching, outbreak of an illness, power plants, discovery, excavation, radiation, vehicles departing, etc.
I just checked my dictionaries because of the non-trivial chance of someone vandalizing random Wikipedia pages with sex references.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at June 19, 2009 10:24 PM (2XtN5)
5
In fact that could have been a "hovercraft full of eels" moment, couldn't it?
10
Hah, I'm almost certain that Wikipedia article didn't have that particular edit the last time I looked at it. I'm pretty sure I would've noticed. u_u;
The TBS television network reports that Japan’s independent PC game review committee will prohibit the production and sale of all adult computer games prominently featuring depictions of rape. The revised review criteria to certify games for production and release will take effect on June 2. Rape themed games are estimated to presently constitute up to 20% of Japan’s adult PC games. The ban will apply to approximately 200 commercial game development studios.
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From what I've heard, there's no legal ban. This is an industry group, not the government. One suspects that the market will simply shift from those companies to other companies who aren't members of the industry group; we're not talking about big game production studios, here.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at May 28, 2009 08:21 PM (vGfoR)
2
Often this sort of stuff in Japan is rolled out with a big fanfare, then is honored more in the breech than the observance. For example, the censorship level of ero-manga wobbles all over the place depending on the public and political visibility of the issue (so to speak). (Oddly, the level of censorship in ero-manga is often decided by the printers, not the publishers.) On the other hand, the cops did march into the offices of six of the companies that do the digital mosaic work for the real live pron films and made arrests a couple weeks ago because it was determined their work was inadequate, so there is always a risk. The fact that the Japanese often hesitate to draw a bright line cuts both ways.
With help from HC (thanks!), I finally figured out how to write the name of Krillin's signature attack, which is romanized as "kienzan". Turns out it's 気円斬.
気 ki is the energy they use for their attacks. 円 en means "circle". 斬 can be read a number of ways, one of which is zan. It means "beheading, kill, murder".
It is indeed a killing attack, which is why Krillin only uses it when he's really serious. He used it against Nappa but missed; Nappa dodged it. He used it against Frieza and took Frieza's tail off with it. He used it against Cell, but Cell was too strong; it bounced. And later he used it against Kid Buu, and cut him in half. Problem is, that doesn't matter to Kid Buu; he just rejoined the pieces.
Anyway, it's one of the coolest attacks in the series, and I've long wanted to know what the Japanese name meant.
("Kienzan" is a lot cooler than "Destructo Disk". Generally the English names for most of the attacks are very boring. "Makankosappo" is cooler than "Special Beam Cannon", too. Hmmm... wonder how you write that one? Betcha it starts é”)
UPDATE: When I googled for the first two kanji in sequence, I found some places that had a different name for it: 気円烈斬
The third kanji 烈 is read as retsu and it means "violent
, severe
, extreme
", which I rather like. Maybe that's from the manga. It shows up in the game. But it's never used in the anime.
UPDATE: It just occurred to me that Krillin only uses kienzan against enemies who are themselves killers. When he used it against Nappa, Tenshinhan, Chaozu, and Yamucha had already been killed. Frieza? Was already drenched in blood. He used it against Cell only after cell absorbed Android 18. And Buu had already blown up the earth and killed everyone when Krillin shot it at him.
Ep 9 of Kamichu is pretty much the only part of it I ever rewatch, but I revisit it several times per year. There's just something about that episode that resonates with me, and not just because it features IJN Yamato. (It's also what I wanted most from the series: lots of magic, and no middle-school angst. Shame most of the episodes weren't like this one.)
Over at the Duck's I left a joke comment about how the guy who built the 1/40 scale Yamato replica out of Legos forgot the "Soda is available" sign. That's a reference to this episode. Yurie researches the ship and learns that there was a room in it where they made soda. She thinks maybe there was a sign like that on the ship. The sign to which she refers is one that shows up in corner grocery stores:
First two characters are hiragana ã‚ã‚Š ari and I've got it worked out that the word must be a version of ariawase which means "on hand, available, ready", but I cannot figure out what that last kanji is. It looks as if it's 4 strokes, especially the way Yurie writes it (though she's being sloppy about leaving out a corner in her first stroke). None of my standard tools are helping me here, either. There doesn't seem to be any 4-stroke kanji based on either å£ or å›—, according to the Multradix lookup. And I can't find anything that looks like that in the Jouyou Kanji.
It's driving me nuts. Anyone care to help me out here?
1
It's not kanji, properly speaking, but rather an informal abbreviation for the -masu ending. If you want to look it up, it's unicode character 303c.
Posted by: HC at April 15, 2009 09:42 PM (y9yco)
2
Ramune's not quite soda pop. It's a fizzy drink with a peculiar flavor, more tart and less sweet than cola. Try a bottle if the chance avails itself, but don't buy a case until you've tried it.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at April 15, 2009 10:10 PM (vGfoR)
The impression I get is that it's a specific term that's become generic, like the way that gohan specifically means "rice" but is also used generically to mean "food" or "meal".
5It's a fizzy drink with a peculiar flavor, more tart and less sweet than cola.
Depends on which flavor you're drinking. The original Ramune flavor tastes like a sweeter Sierra Mist to me, or perhaps bubblegum. I'm not sure where you get the more tart part from, though... except for the lychee flavor, all that I've tasted are very sweet.
I just realized I've got five flavors in my fridge right now... original, strawberry, melon, lychee, and peach. I really only like the first two, though.
Posted by: Wonderduck at April 16, 2009 05:03 AM (2+BgR)
6
In my limited experience R/Lamune is a brandof Japanese soda also POPular in Taiwan and Korea. The only word for soda I've heard is Koora (cola). Note though, that my experience is limited to classes here and 44 days (non sequential) in the country .
I like Ramune...As Avatar says, it's generally not as sweet as US sodas.