Just Two Lines from Page Six

1: ……やめよう。
……Yame yō。
......Let's stop this.

2: こんな・カッコ・で・バカ・みたい・だ。
Konna kakko de baka mitai da。

I guess カッコ (kakko) would make immediate sense to someone who grew up speaking Japanese, but it's a real puzzler to me. Both Babelfish and Google translation guess it is the same as 括弧 which can mean parentheses or brackets. Neither of those seems to make much sense here, do they? Jim Breen's online Japanese dictionary comes up with quite a few more words that can be pronounce kakko. The first, 格好 or 恰好, can mean "appearance" and is probably the right meaning here, which Google renders as "I was dressed like an idiot." which can easily mean "We are dressed/look like idiots." The tense implies a completed action, so by extension I will render this way:

We're already dressed like idiots.

Perhaps Daichi is implying that they should not add icing to the cake by behaving like idiots, especially in public.

Lesson 35, Page 5 (Part One)

1: 歌舞伎町内での奉仕活動はともかく…
I guess doing public service inside Kabuki Chō is okay...

2: なんで肉じゅばんなの?
But why do we have to wear these fat suits?

3: これなら、水着姿とかの方が、なんぼかましょう!!
I thought it would be swimsuits, that would be so much better!!

4: 女子なんかまだいいよ。 なんで男だけヅラ着用なんだよ!!
You girls caught a break. Us guys have to wear these stupid wigs!!

I Discover Mizushō

There it was, in a tiny section of (Big American Chain Bookstore) in the San Francisco Bay Area: the first six volumes of a series I'd never heard of, in Japanese, priced at more than twice the average of the translated volumes. But I couldn't resist. All right, so the back art may have, er, interested me. So I bit my tongue heavily and opened my wallet.

A little web research found that Tamascans was scanlating this series, but they'd barely gotten into Volume 2. But looking at the inscrutable chapters to the end of Volume 6 uncovered one definite fact: Volume 6 ended in a genuine cliffhanger. I had to find out what happened next!

More research uncovered Kinokuniya, one of the oldest booksellers in Japan, and revealed that Kinokuniya had not one but two stores in the San Francisco Bay Area: One in the Japan Town Center in San Francisco, and another in an obscure mall called the Strawberry Plaza in San Jose. Soon I had four more volumes in hand, including Volume 7. Up until then, I had only translated here and there, except for the final chapter of Volume 6. I found that all of Volume 7 except for one "Special Lesson" was part of this new story arc, a much grimmer one than anything before. In fact, Volume 7 ends in another cliffhanger, and the arc continues into Volume 8. I translated all of this to the best of my ability, taking a long time.

And then...Something unfortunate happened which I will not explain further, except that I lost all my volumes, all my resources, leaving only what I remembered (not much, and less of that correctly.)

I replaced my physical resources after a rough patch, but Real World concerns took precedence for awhile. My girlfriend was basically crippled until her hip operation, and recovery from that took some time. With Tamascans slowly but surely working forward, I did no work on re-translating what I'd done before. When I got serious about deciphering some more, I did a much later arc, the trip to Hokkaido (mostly Volume 15.)

My first full-fledged scanlation was of a shorter arc beginning the next volume. It interested me because Suwahara, the very frightening man introduced in Volume 7, returned, and there was an even bigger surprise: someone thought to be dead, wasn't. I posted this at Delta Anime Torrents to rousing...silence. Not one peep of feedback. My glorious, carefully cleaned 400dpi scanlations seemed totally unappreciated. Ah, well, there was still Tamascans, faithfully...

Well, maybe not so faithfully. The translator for SOWB quit after seventeen chapters, not even finishing out his current story arc. They didn't seem interested in my own efforts; I guess it would have soiled their purity, or some such. Apparently they thought they shouldn't even get to the end of Volume 3.

And then Manga Fox came to the rescue. After waiting for almost a year for Mangavolume to allow new series in, I've gotten seventeen more chapters up on Manga Fox in not that many weeks. I doubt I can keep up this blistering pace, but allow me to gloat. I don't get a lot of chances to gloat. The first thirty-four Lessons of Mizushō are now available in translation, good or not-so-good, bringing the saga into the middle of Volume 4.

Manga Fox isn't quite perfect, though; you can only post pictures and make posts on their forums, which never stay up very long. This blog should allow for more comment, some of it even interesting.

BTW, my Kinokuniya sells the volumes at seven bucks each, less than a third of what (Big American Chain Bookstore ) was charging.

Sazae-san

Apropos of nothing in Mizushō, on my last trip to Kinokuniya I got several of Kodansha's bilingual manga, incuding Volume 1 of Sazae-san, one of the most beloved and long-running manga series of all time. Sazae-san started way back in 1949, picturing life in a still-occupied Japan with rationing and lots of wandering American soldiers. Sazae hasn't acquired a husband or children yet, but she's already taking care of a lot of people even if they don't think they need taking care of.

My girlfriend thinks she looks like Olive Oyl, and I guess there is a slight resemblance in the way the faces are drawn, though Sazae is more of a full-figured gal (as the rather tight dresses she often wore in 1949 show.)

What the heck is "Mizushō"?

I think this log is going to be mostly about my efforts to decipher 都立水商!The School of Water Business, a manga series by Inokuma Shinobu (猪熊・しのぶ.) The English portion is part of the long version of the official title. The kanji 都立水商 are read "Toritsu Mizushō" meaning "Metropolitan Water Trade/Business." This is a short version of the full name of the fictional vocational high school where the series (mostly) takes place. One of the newer teachers thought it taught plumbers their trade, but she was quickly disabused. The water trade is only peripherally involved with plumbing of the metal-or-plastic-pipe variety, although the "plumbing" installed by nature on the chest and south of the belly button is often heavily involved.

都立水商! first appeared in the form of a "light novel" by Murozumi Hikaru (室積・光), who is given credit above Inokuma in the manga series, but actually Inokuma Shinobu has used little of the novel in his manga, though it does most definitely retain the connection to the Water Trade. So far nineteen volumes have been published. I'd love to get scans from the magazine, Young Sunday, but Kinokuniya stopped carrying it over here a long time ago, and furthermore, Young Sunday itself seems to be folding in Japan, at least according to what I can get from Inokuma's own blog (in Japanese, of course!) or maybe Mizushō is just leaving it. Where Mizushō's new home will be is still an unsolved mystery to me.

This just in: A peek at Inokuma's own site The Garden Plot shows the cover of volume 20, probably not the final version since all the other covers have a white background. It was supposed to be on the (Japanese) streets as of 9/5--which would be 9/4 here since the USA, including Pearl Harbor, is on the other side of the International Date Line from Japan. The Kinokuniya store I go to says it takes a week or sometimes two before they get shipments of the latest titles to be released in Japan.