I’m surprised your boyfriend didn’t know about the removing shoes, but I suppose the apartments thing is understandable. It’s not just Japan that is like that either, in Hong Kong owning an actual house generally means you are loaded. I know people there who use hammocks because they don’t have enough space in the apartments for beds for the whole family. =)

Not everyone can have their dream jobs and such, but not being able to fulfill a dream and giving up on your life before you turn 18 are two entirely different things. One of my Japanese professors loves Takeshi though, thinks he should be made prime minister heh.

I’ve always found the bukatsu thing to be more about having an excuse to have a group to hang out in than actually working towards anything or planing for a future in anyway.

Tests and grades here are misleading. For one thing almost all Japanese are graded on a curve not an absolute scoring system, so since that obviously means somebody has to have a high score they are skewed compared to other countries. That’s why Japan can have fairly high “official” test results and still have kids whose knowledge of history and geography is almost as bad as ours back in the U.S. ;)

There is a huge tendency to study just FOR tests here rather than to actually learn the material. An obvious danger with tests anywhere, but a lot of the tests here seem especially pointless. The TOEIC and TEOSL and the other tests are mostly from the U.S., but they are generally pointless as well. I’ve actually taken parts of the toeic and even though I write/edit/translate for a living and scored perfect on the SAT verbal in high school I still couldn’t score perfect on the sections where they want you to point out what syllables need to be accented in words and such.

Smoking here is bad, but I suppose thats to be expected when the government is one of the major owners of the tobacco company. ;)

The senpai kouhai, etc. stuff never really made too much sense to me. Generally just an institutionalized form of bullying in a lot of cases, but I imagine growing up in the “system” gives you a perspective I’m unable to develop from my outside viewpoint.

There’s plenty I do like about Japan. Fast food places are one of them, they were a bit of a shock when I went home after being here for awhile. Had the misfortune of changing planes in Chicago and having the staff at O’hare being the first Americans I interacted with back home. I went to a McDonald’s (forgetting how incredibly disgusting it is back home) and when I got up to the counter the girl behind it just says “What?”. Not, may I help you, etc. Just “What?”.

I also like not having to worry about some random stranger trying to knock my ass out because I was “looking at them all hard” or some similar intelligent reason, but I have to disagree with you on the corn and potato salad on pizza. ;)

You know that Beat Takashi guy, right? Do you know what he actually said on TV about Japanese youth and planning for their future? He said something like “I think it’s good that only a small portion of people actually folllow their dreams and end up doing what they want to do. Nobody wants to work at a convenience store, so if everyone had dreams and went for their dream jobs, we wouldn’t have anyone working the menial part time jobs. Society doesn’t need everyone’s dreams to come true.” And he wasn’t being cute and sarcastic and using humor to make a point, he was serious. And while yes, we would be a little stuck if every single Japanese got their dream job (because I think at least a fourth of all Japanese girls would then be licensed “princesses”), I’d rather the majority of high school kids consider their futures a bit more. The whole 部活 here is something my American school couldn’t compete with, so I thought kids would have more to think about because they have all these school activities that they can do, but for some reason a lot of kids are still clueless. They study as much as they do for tests but it’s like they don’t really consider life after tests. Also, have you ever noticed that taking tests here and your score on tests is how they decide intelligence? My friend said her Japanese friend told her she was glad she did well on tests because it was her “proof to the world” that she was smart. Like the TOEC (or whatever the English proficiency exam is called), where people think scoring a high score means they are fluent, but then they get a job where they work with foreigners and are surprised the big words they memorized aren’t as useful as words like “thanks”. I was pretty surprised when I said “thanks” to a bunch of Eikaiwa students and they didn’t know what I was saying. Don’t they watch American movies like all the time??

Yeah, smoking and drinking is also pretty bad, though I’ve noticed the no-smoking ads on TV and in the subways have been more frequent this past year. My boyfriend quit smoking after I bugged him for months about it, but he wasn’t a heavy smoker like 80% of my friends are. I used to work at an izakaya and it was murder on my health! The cooks even smoked in the kitchen, so I couldn’t escape it. On nights where it was a full house, and you literally had a cloud of smoke hovering over the whole pub, I would go home, blow my nose, and what came out would be BLACK. And after two years of working there, I can’t tell you how many times I saw people drink themselves stupid because their senpai told them to. The senpai figure would go to the bathroom and everyone else at the table would say “Man, I just want to go home, I wanna see me kids…” “Yeah, but senpai wants to keep drinking, so we can’t go home” “Yeah, that’s true. Oh well.” And then senpai would come out, order a round of imojouchuu and they’d wave their ties and applaud. Go home! See your families! Thank God I’m a foreigner here and the senpai/kouhai rules for some reason don’t apply to me. I used to go along with them, but two years of that left me pretty broke from drinking every other night until morning. Of course, my senpai were all washed-up rockers from the ’80s, so getting drunk with them was never enough. We’d have to drink until we were blind, then go someplace else and drink some more, then take a morning train to some onsen out of the city, drink, call some “chicks” to go karaoke with, drink more, and then at around 11 am we were done when the senpai figure finally passed out on the sidewalk with his pants around his ankles. I wish that had only happened once, and with only one senpai, but that was pretty much the usual schedule. It’s no wonder my views of Japan can be pretty jaded, I hung out with the wrong crowd, heh.

You know what I DO like about Japan? You don’t get any snotty high school brat behind the register at a fast food place sneering at you for ordering something with extra pickles. They smile and say “Kashikomarimashita!” like you are their favorite customer of the day. And most American friends I have known have complained that waiters and waitresses won’t talk to you enough at restaurants, but in America I was always thinking “Stop trying to make conversation with me, I am eating!” And I like that they put corn and potato salad on pizza. Amazing!

I figure since I’ve only been mentioning what I don’t like, I should mention what I DO like to balance things out. :D

Also just to clarify, for the working side of things hosting/hostessing is definitely more appealing than being a prostitute (or whatever they want to call it in the soaplands and such), I just personally find, looking at the customer side of things, frequenting hostess/host clubs a bit more sad/creepy somehow.

Lots of underage girls in places they shouldn’t be here. Most businesses aren’t big on carding and some actually use that as their selling point =P

There’s all kinds of stuff like you mention in that game. Obviously different societal views and cultural views and such, also depends on what age group the game is intended for and such. I know a lot of Japanese tend to be shocked by the idea of letting kids play FPS (first person shooter) game where you are essentially a disembodied hand with a gun, but in the states something like 70% of the market for those games is 17 and under.

Drinking and smoking tend to be other big problems when translating games. I always have fun trying to explain to Japanese ossan that in the U.S. going home from work and drinking yourself unconscious everyday is considered being an alcoholic. Actually, if you look at the alcoholism self-assessment, most adult Japanese males are alcoholics by American standards heh.

Protecting the “wa” is everything here, so making waves in the natural order is considered bad/embarassing, even if the natural order is all fucked up. Same reason unpaid overtime and other abuses at work are so common here, no one wants to make waves =P

I think Japan somewhat glorifies hostessing, though. On TV they often show women who are the top ranking hostesses and will show off their apartments and talk about how much money they make, etc. I bought a game the other day for cheap of that Nana manga (it’s one of my favorites), and it turned out to be one of those life-sim games where you have to dress up and meet boys, etc. One thing you had to do was get a job, and they had two hostessing jobs available. The way the game was set up, if you didn’t work you couldn’t make money, buy clothes, etc, and that would hurt you in your goal of being popular (I think?) and you’d lose points, and like RL the hostessing job was the quick way to get money so I would bet most kids playing this would click that option. The game also made it harder to hold a job than in real life, so in the end I even had to use the virtual hostess gig to make ends meet in the game! Can you imagine there being a Barbie game where kids could be Call-Girl Barbie? Not quite the same, but still.

Dude, you are awesome for clocking a chikan. If my boyfriend ever did that he would forever be the sexiest man alive to me. I have heard Japanese talk about “no no, it’s best not to make a scene”, but I can’t figure out why. Once at Donki my Hong Kong friend caught a guy robbing her wallet red-handed and we were all taken to the police station. They were really excited that a foreigner had caught him because apparently he had been apprehended like four times for theft, but NOBODY had ever pressed charges against him! I asked why and they said “Well, Japanese people just find it too troubling and don’t want to be involved in these sorts of things.” So when my friend decided to press charges they took a huge bow and thanked her. I thought it was really weird, though, when in the store she was wrestling the guy and I was calling for security NOBODY tried to help her. But she could handle him because Hong Kong women are TOUGH.

Most of the people who I know who work/worked as hosts/hostesses did it because they needed money. One had two kids and both the parents were full-time university students and foreigners to boot, so the wife worked as a hostess nights to make money. The husband worked as an English teacher and a host, although the guys don’t make anywhere near the same amount of “easy” money the girls do, so he ended up quitting it pretty quick. Another lives alone with their father who does nothing but use money, and the girl pays for the house and everything else, etc. etc.

There are plenty of them who do it just to make quick buck for the latest brand whatever, and for the guys there are definitely plenty of them that do it as some sort of ego trip. I personally have always found the hostess/host industry somewhat more repulsive than prostitution. Prostitution is generally someone just trying to quash a physical desire, but paying those insane amounts of money to have people pretend to like you, talk to you, etc. just strikes me as repulsive/pathetic.

But hey, I don’t patronize the places, and if other people choose to do so, or choose to work in those places it’s no skin of my nose. Morality, standards, etc. are all fine and good until the taxman is knocking down the door and we all have different lines we’re willing/unwilling to cross.

Police in kabukicho are too busy accepting bribes and playing mahjong. Intervening in this country is sort of a mixed bag. It can lead to weird situations back home too, but it always seems to lead to weird situations here.

I was on a train with a female friend when a guy groped her, right in front of me, saw the whole thing. I guess he didn’t think I was with her or something I dunno. I clocked the guy and threw him off the train at the next stop and man the girl got pissed at me for causing a scene. She was mad at me for weeks and would rather I had just let the whole thing go.

Another time on a train some whacko attacked the conductor and I intervened and ended up stuck in the police station being questioned for 12 hours. All I did was grab the guy from behind and hold him until we got to the next station.

Toda Natsuko’s translations are generally horrible. In fairness, a lot of humor is really hard to translate, but things could still be done better than she does them. But she’ll be in place until she dies, as with so many other things in Japan.

Yeah, Dizon strikes me as a bit of a clod and I can’t imagine her being very popular with the staff/wranglers etc. Meh. Again, no big loss for me if she disappears from my tv. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if she did end up doing nude stuff or whatnot if she can’t get regular “geinou jin” work anymore.

OH! I’ve seen that woman’s name before at the movies! Her translations are TERRIBLE. My friend and I vowed someday to protest the movie industry because she’s so bad, but we of course never followed through with it. I think it’s funny how in America the reverse always happened– there’d be too many additions to the subtitles that the characters hadn’t said at all.

I always think that as long as I have a dictionary I can translate anything.. until I talk to a kogal. I saw some comedianne named Hime-chan on TV this weekend and only understood half of what she was saying, and almost every joke fell flat with me because I don’t have any gal friends anymore and their “gal speak” changes every three months. I can’t keep up! I would imagine gangsta speak and net speak would be really hard for a Japanese person to translate.

Read something about Leah Dizon in the news the other day. She apparently didn’t tell ANYONE she was pregnant and her agency has said “She THINKS she’s coming back, but not with us! She was selfish and always cancelling jobs and demanding things, and she didn’t even tell us she was pregnant. What was she thinking?! She’ll never work in Japan again.” Apparently the fans are mad that she got pregnant before she ever did a nude photo, heh. Actually, I’ve never seen fans turn on an idol like this before… some are mad that Leah lied about being a virgin. Ha! The only other Leah stuff I’ve heard lately are owarai saying “Big peach!” over and over in their acts. I dunno if she lost her last sponsor, but that commercial where there were duplicates of her seems to have gotten pulled. I think I’m actually surprised that Japan has lost all interest in her in just one month. I thought they’d still route for her until she got fat… oh well.

The little translation test there is hard, and yes spaces do count as a character, so your version, while not bad sounding, would be rejected because you end up with 5 lines if you make each fit within 25 characters, and trying to rewrite it so they fit is a total pain in the ass.
I took my whining dog for
a walk, but after
shutting the door I
realized I forgot my keys
.

You see especially the “shutting” and “realized” being long words end up hitting the 25 word limit in the middle of the word, and you can’t hyphenate words and split them on lines, so you end up with a lot of wasted space, including the final period not fitting.

Now imagine trying to do that for a 30,000 character translation that you need to have done in 2-3 days =)

On top of this, add that game translations are among the lowest paying translations I work with, and you really have to enjoy doing them to bother.

Yeah there are definitely some similarities most foreigners who have been here for a time will find in the manga. They are fairly interesting. It goes to show how well done they are, since they are written almost entirely by the Japanese half of the relationship, but still (in my opinion anyway) seem to do a fair job of representing both viewpoints. They are still more about the differences than the similarities, but I think that’s what most people tend to find interesting.

I didn’t think you meant moral in a religious sense, but in a strictly moral sense. As in according to one’s own moral code. Like I said before, I’m not necessarily against prostitution, I don’t generally care what other people do with their private lives, but I’d never use it myself. Sex for the sake of sex alone has never had that much appeal for me. I don’t find myself interested in sex if it’s not with someone I’m interested in, and I don’t find myself able to be interested in someone who has sex for money, so it is sort of a non-issue for me.

I have to admit that I do tend to have a lesser view of someone who has sold sex, but I don’t think it’s the end all determining factor of a person’s character.

I’ve had friends, both male and female, who have worked in the host/hostess industry and the entire scene is fairly scuzzy, but that’s more or less what I expected. Mind you, alot of the people involved really are complete and total human dross, but there are those involved just because of poor circumstances or lack of judgment.

There is definitely need of better legal controls for all of those related industries however. There’s a lot of people being taken advantage of on both sides and a lot of really sketchy stuff that happens, I figure if they are going to legalize it they may as well try actually keeping it as clean as possible.

I took you up on your challenge. “I took my whining dog for a walk, but after shutting the door I realized I forgot my keys.” I don’t even think that’s correct English (”I’d forgotten”)… oh, I bet you meant spaces too, right? Forgot to count those. Oh well, your point was definitely made, it’s hard!

I actually bought the first volume of the Darling Wa Gaikokujin series yesterday. I got halfway through it when my boyfriend came home and I told him he should read this, “It’s me with a beard!!” because he thinks it’s weird that I yell at movies or games, get overly emotional about certain (stupid) subjects, sometimes complain at restaurants, and can read and write a lot of kanji and big words but will sometimes get stuck on something simple. When I came back after a shower I found him reading it, so it’ll be interesting to hear his thoughts since he’s been with me for nearly a year now and has experienced the ups and downs of dating a foreigner. We didn’t have trouble with the 不動産屋 when we found an apartment together, but we’ve been turned away from a hotel before because of the way I look.

When I say morally wrong, I don’t really mean religiously speaking, but there’s just something wrong about paying for something like sex or companionship of any kind (I also disapprove of host and hostess clubs, which doesn’t involve sex). When I was 21 I got talked into working at a hostess club, and at that age I wanted to try just about everything once, just so I could say I’d been there done that. So I took the job, but wouldn’t you know, it was a pink salon, and I was the only white girl there who was, well, decent looking and under 30. So I decided not to knock it before trying it, and I did one day’s work. Some of the customers were okay, didn’t have families, etc. Karaoke was fun, and some of the other girls were hillarious. Customers said they had fun, left after they ran out of money (which is sad, why blow all your money on drinks for us? our drinks were watered down so we wouldn’t get drunk anyway), and that was fun for me. But then came the married man with kids, who I managed to convince to go home (he was nervous and obviously had second thoughts about coming), the married men who talked badly of their wife and children (which is just downright scummy), and the gross Hong Kong guy who kept trying to buy me, like I was a pet or something. They got like Y200,000 out of the guy because they promised him I would sleep with him, even after I refused. He got so mad when I refused to do anything with him that they had to throw him out. He offered more money and then when they kicked him out demanded he get what he paid back. The other girls laughed when he was gone, called him a desperate loser, and smoked while the scouts hunted for other customers. The owner than tried to “break me in” by having alone time with him, and after escaping that I decided this kind of world was not “okay”, because women shouldn’t be treated like objects and they shouldn’t let themselves be treated like objects. None of the women who worked there were happy or cared at all for their clients. My prostitute friend I mentioned earlier said she usually had repeat clients who brought her gifts and stuff, as if she was their real girlfriend. They tried to take her out, etc.

My boyfriend has gone there in the past (”but just for receiving, because there is no way in hell I would go down on a woman like that”) when he was younger, and he said the reason he did it was because at that time it seemed like a better plan than courting a girl, taking her out and paying for everything, and then possibly not even getting sex. I don’t see why men can’t just do what women do and buy a big-people’s toy. I’ve never met a girl who has paid for sex before.

I think the only time I don’t mind prostitution too much is when you have that rare case where the woman is a nympho and really honestly loves her job. I have met one before, and technically she wasn’t paid for having sex with others. She worked at a sex club, where members could have sex with their partners in public or whatever, and said that she often got invited to participate. That doesn’t bother me somehow. But men who have girlfriends or families and go, and men who go frequently, that really strikes me as pathetic. What I find even weirder is when I meet guys who are good looking and nice who tell me they’ve been before (like, well, my boyfriend). What are women supposed to do in this country when even the good ones are scumbags!?

Man, I need to stop ranting about this. I do think it’s funny, though, when my guy friends tell me “I’m sure your guy friends in America have all been, too”. Uh, no, they haven’t. I do have a favorite term, though, I picked up from my working friend; 素人童貞, a man who has only ever had sex he’s had to pay for. Now THAT’S pathetic.

The first two manga are decent, the one’s that are actually written by Tony are horrendously boring and aren’t worth buying, but his wife is a funny lady.

Yeah, there is a lot of stuff in games that isn’t interesting at all. Actually doing dialog and story/narration and stuff can be fun, but it also depends on how much freedom you have. A lot of games you don’t get to name characters or anything, English names are already decided. Then there are games where there are stupid parameters you have to stick to. One of my least favorite is the Japanese translation industries tendency to equate Osaka dialect with a southern U.S./Texas, stereotypical hillybilly accent regardless of the setting of the game, which is why you sometimes end up with characters talking like Billy Bob Clampett in a medieval role-playing game…

I’ve done a few games for the DS now, but portables actually present another problem which you don’t think about until faced with it the first time. Most games have a limit on the number of text characters you can use in one “speech bubble” or dialog or whatever, but because the DS and other portables have such small screens, the text is tiny, and players don’t generally like having to scroll through 15 pages of text dialog, so you end up with absolutely insane limits of like 3 lines of 25 characters each max which doesn’t work very well.

Ex.
犬が鳴いたので散歩に連れて
行ったけどドアを閉めたら鍵
忘れちゃったこと気づいた！

in 25 characters per line total 3 lines in English is not easy to do.
This is 22 characters.
So translating the above is hard:
You would want a decent translation to be something like:

The dog was whining, so I decided to talk him for a walk, but after I shut the door behind myself, I realized I had forgotten my key!

Which is almost twice as many characters as allowed total, but it’s not even just a matter of dropping it to 75 characters total, because you would have to manage to perfectly fit 25 characters per line, perfect, including spaces!

Try playing around with the above and see if you can rewrite it to fit those parameters. What I quickly came up with is below, but it’s a clunky sentence.

The dog whined so I went
to walk him, but I forgot
my key inside the house!

Also note that being forced to leave mistakes and stuff is fairly common. One very common reason for this is because a lot of companies have been handling translations before you or I or whatever native speaker came along, and they don’t want to have to tell the client that there were “this many” mistakes in past translations which they were responsible for!

Well I knew that Tony was at least based off the author’s real life husband, but I never knew how much was real and how much was exaggerated, etc. That beard cracks me up every time I see it! I think I’ll pick up a copy of the manga on my way home today.

I was watching my boyfriend play one of his war games last night, and there were SO many sub menus and menus and scripts flying up everywhere, that MUST be tough work translating. But I would love to work on a game like Pokemon. I played that when I was 13 and I got into it again when I bought my DS, and I always thought naming the monsters would be fun. I’ve done manuals before, but not a game manual. I was actually told by my employer that I was too much of a stickler for details, and that it didn’t have to be ALL right (wtf?), and the final product ended up not having all of my revisions put into it. So from now on they have me translate and revise it and circle the revisions that are the “most important”. So it will still say “we are pleased to be making of the friendship with great humans”, but the fire safety guide at least will be all correct. Since I prefer to do a job PROPERLY, these bizarre requests to cut back kinda get to me.