Lesson 37

Finally finished up with Lesson 37. I hope there's someone left to read it. Download it at [Sorry, service has been shut down.]

If you don't know already, Mizusho got kicked off of Mangafox along with a lot of other "mature" series. I'm looking for other homes.

UPDATE: Mizusho is back on Mangafox, but Megaupload is dead now.

My g/f got me a DVD of Avatar, so I finally got to see it. Even without 3D, it's a good movie, though after reading the original script I think it would been a better movie if there was a little more backstory.

The latest IMDB review complains that it's a ripoff of Star Wars, which it is not. If anything, it's “inspired” by a Harry Harrison novel from the 1960's, Deathworld. That novel featured human colonists fighting the ecology of a planet that was all linked together in an empathic gestalt, so that the harder they fought, the meaner and tougher the hostile critters got. Admittedly the colonists weren't servants of a greedy megacorporation; they were simply annoyed at the small hazards of country life when they first landed, such as bug bites and plants with thorns. They got mad...and the ecology responded to their anger, starting the cycle. I'll bet James Cameron has read that novel.

Another possible source of inspiration is Alan Dean Foster's Midworld, which features human colonists who've gone “native” and fight to defend their home tree.

James Cameron is probably going to do at least one sequel, but first will come (I really hope this time) Battle Angel.

I've read two outstanding books over the last week: Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein and Last Train From Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino. The first is relevant to the Mizushō background because it has a lot of stuff about the water trade and Yakuza involvement in it. There's even a chapter called “Welcome to Kabukichō.” The second book is a tougher read, though it is beautifully written. Last Train has been optioned by James Cameron, so we might see a spectacularly gruesome recreation of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Chapter 36

Was available at Megaupload, before the FBI shut them down.

After a very long wait, I just posted Lesson 35 of Water Business at Manga Fox. I'm pretty sure I didn't make any huge mistakes in my translation, though it is a very free one in places.
I have also acquired a copy of the novel Toritsu Mizushō! by Hikaru Murozumi. I'm not going to be posting a translation of it; that much Japanese is too much for me. But I am sort of deciphering what I can of it; I've already OCR'd it and searched it for character names to find out who's in and who isn't.
One thing that the manga series completely skipped over was the "off-campus-training" for the fūzoku girls. Inokuma had been building up to it at least to Volume 20, but then the storyline jumps over nearly the entire third year. There is a chapter in the novel covering it, but it's only a few pages and it's all exposition--no action scenes, not even any dialogue. It all takes place in six days during the break between the end of the second year and the beginning of the third.
I was pretty disappointed the way Inokuma handled it. He may have had no choice in the matter; the series was cut short by the end of its magazine. Maybe he was ordered to avoid the subject. There's been a lot of noise about "cleaning up" Kabukichō over the past few years; the demolition of the Koma Theater is supposed to be part of it (although I fail to see how closing down the only venue for actual kabuki in Kabukichō would hurt the sex industry.)
Why am I so disappointed? Because the tension between Mari Oda and Daichi Nagasawa over her actually doing sex work was never properly resolved. It was a big plot point: Could a sex worker go on to have a satisfactory marriage? How difficult would it be to dispel the stigma? Dispelling the stigma of sex work and the rest of the Water Trade is, after all, the entire mission of The School of Water Business. It's just a bit more than a comedy.

Warren G. Harding: Lousy President, Great Bloviator

The only disagreement among reputable historians about the President who returned the USA to “normalcy” is whether or not he was the absolute worst holder of the office (the other candidate being Ulysses S. Grant.) Harding didn't particularly want to be President, but he had the look of what Republicans liked in a president. Even so, the affable Ohio newspaperman wouldn't have demonstrated the Peter Principle to the nth degree had not Theodore Roosevelt inconveniently died when he did, leaving the GOP kingmakers like Mark Hanna an opening to nominate a good-looking boob who could turn out wondrous malapropisms like “normalcy.” Actually Harding wasn't that dumb; he called his speechifying “bloviating,” a word that has made it into some dictionaries. What demonstrated that he was not as dumb as he sounded was that he knew what he was doing.

Eisenhower was another great bloviator, projecting himself quite deliberately as a not-overly-smart but lovable, well-meaning, even-tempered uncle. The difference between Eisenhower and Harding is that Eisenhower was a genuine leader covering up state secrets such as the U-2 program, CIA-arranged coups in Iran and Guatemala, and under-the-table-but-very-credible threats to nuke the USSR and China if they didn't stop the war in Korea. Harding was merely covering up his mistress, his bootlegger, his gambling, and his blind eye to what his cronies were up to, such as stealing millions of government dollars when a million dollars was really worth something.

Harding may well have done at least one statesmanlike thing: He died before the big scandals broke. He happened to die in San Francisco, which is why there used to be a Harding movie theater in the Western Addition.

Tragically, very few bloviators know they are bloviators because they really believe their own B.S.

And now for some of my own bloviating.

I just discovered Japanese with Chris, wherein Christopher M. Ball shares his adventures in trying to learn (some) Japanese. He lists his sources rather thoroughly. Rather than overload his comments section, I decided to make a somewhat similar listing here. Seems appropriate, since the main theme of this blog is supposed to be my efforts to master enough Japanese to decipher a manga series that has no official translation and no active scanlators other than myself. These are my non-electronic resources (although I have scanned and otherwise bashed quite a lot of material from my library.)

Manga series

Toritsu Mizushō 都立水商! (22 volumes, complete, of course!!) (And I have ordered the light novel the manga is supposed to be based on.)

Jōō 嬢王 (12 volumes, the complete first series)

Some volumes of 「魔法先生ねぎま」、「ああっ女神さまっ」、「かりん」、「ぱすてる」、「ガチャガチャ」in both the original and in authorized English-language editions. Nearly all of these have at least one unofficial translation floating around somewhere on the web, so it can be quite interesting to see how much “your mileage may vary” between two different translators. For AMS/Oh My Goddess! there are two authorized translations available for some volumes, one done by Studio Proteus when Dark Horse was bringing out the series in flipped, monthly comic-book form, and a new one for the Complete reworking of the early parts of the series (which also restores the colored artwork.) I have other manga, translated or original, but few matched pairs.

Volumes 1 and 3 of Kenshi Hirokane's Division Chief Kosaku Shima, officially translated by Ralph F. McCarthy, with the original Japanese in the margins—part of the Kodansha Bilingual Comics series.

In the same vein, a tiny bilingual Volume 1 of the venerable series Sanae-san, 4-panels from 1947.

Books for Japanese Study

Jack Halpern's Learner's Kanji Dictionary

Spahn & Hadamitzky's Kanji Learner's Dictionary

Wayne P. Lammer's Japanese the Manga Way (a gem)

Manga University's Kanji de Manga, volumes 1-6; Yojijukugo; Japanese Sound FX

Tuttle's Colloquial Kansai Japanese and The Complete Japanese Expression Guide

Japanese in Manga Land, Volumes 1-3

Zakkenayo!

Barron's 501 Japanese Verbs

Japanese Slang Uncensored

Best Line I Ever Heard in Real Life

On TV, and especially in the movies, clever lines abound, but few of them were ad-libbed by the actors or polititions, who both use writers. I'm going to tell you about the best line I've ever heard in real life (that is, what you and I would have if we didn't spend our lives in front of computer screens.) I can't remember exactly who said it so long ago (more than thirty years) but I do remember the time and place. It was in the Petty Officer's Club in Rota, Spain where someone who'd had too many cervezas tried to pick a fight. The object of his non-affection said to the guy: "Don't mess with me! I know karate!! ... and several other Japanese words."

Anyway, back then I probably knew fewer Japanese words than my clever friend and not only did not know any kanji but never expected to learn any. But now that I do know at least a few kanji, I'd like to tell you about the connection between karate (空手) andkaraoke (空オケ). That's right, they both begin with 空 (sounded "kara") ; kara-te is "empty hand" and kara-oke is, roughly, "empty voice," -oka being a contraction. And 空桶 is "empty bucket" although it sounds just like karaoke. This suggests to me that many karaoke singers should be required to sing with buckets over their heads so they will have a chance to realize just how awful they are, or at least a chance to muffle their voices a bit. Oh, 空 can also be sounded "sora" in which case it means "sky" or "heavens," and is the Kanji 長谷川 空　(Sora Hasegawa) of Ah! Megami-sama! uses for her personal name.