Non-believers

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who took notice of President Obama’s mention of “non-believers” in his inaugural address the other day. Brief recap:

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. …

I consider myself an atheist. My (non-)faith isn’t a driving force in my life, but once I did join the American Atheists just so I could call myself a “card-carrying atheist.” (That didn’t work out, as the card was laminated in a way that made it too big to fit in a standard wallet card slot.) As one of the “non-believers,” I greatly appreciate President Obama’s recognition, and I hope that he will maintain his pro-science stance, and uphold the separation of church and state.

In case anyone’s wondering, this is a big deal. I have a suspicion that atheists are probably the most hated group of people in America, certainly more than minorities and gays. Take this exchange between George Bush Senior and a reporter:

Sherman

What will you do to win the votes of the Americans who are atheists?

Bush

I guess I’m pretty weak in the atheist community. Faith in God is important to me.

Sherman

Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?

Bush

No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

Sherman (somewhat taken aback):

Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?

Bush

Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I’m just not very high on atheists.

I don’t care if he likes atheists, but to say that “atheists shouldn’t be considered citizens?” That’s an unacceptable point of view from someone whose job was to lead the nation and uphold the Constitution (which says nothing about “belief in God” being a requirement for citizenship).

A 2007 Gallup poll asked what kind of candidate people would vote for for president. How did atheists fare? They’re at the bottom of the list, below Mormons, homosexuals, and all races, ethnicities, sexes, and religions. In fact, atheists were the only group that got more than 50% saying “no, would not vote for.”

So you can see how this is an important step forward.

Unsurprisingly, some people are quibbling over the particular word Obama used. “Non-believer” isn’t poetic by any means, but I think it’s reasonable given the options. “Atheists” and “agnostics” are both out because neither group encompasses the other. “Freethinkers” seems to imply some superiority over “non-freethinkers.” Ultimately, I’m just happy the issue is on the table.

Good luck, Mr. President. You have a hard road ahead.

Electronic dictionary recommendations

Electronic Japanese-English dictionaries are very popular among Japanese language learners, and the subject of which to buy is a perennial classic as there are constantly newer and better models coming out. Having been through this myself, I thought I’d weigh in.

The last electronic dictionary I had was a Seiko Japanese-English-Chinese one, probably an older version of this model. I tend to like Seikos in general, for no particularly good reason. Anything that has Kōjien (広辞苑, the standard Japanese-Japanese dictionary) and Kanjigen (漢字源, the standard kanji dictionary) is pretty much good enough in my book.

But when that Seiko inexplicably died after only 2 years and I was out ¥30,000 and left with no dictionary, I vowed never to buy another electronic dictionary again. I don’t need portability—pretty much the only time I need dictionaries these days is when I’m sitting at my computer. So I bought the PC version of Kōjien (also works natively on OS X, and on Linux via 3rd party software) and called it a day. Between Kōjien and the various other dictionaries available online, I find that I just don’t need a portable electronic dictionary.

Major dictionaries available online:

• Eijirō EJ/JE
• Daijirin and Daijisen JJ, Progressive EJ/JE, New Global EJ, New Century JE
• EDICT EJ/JE

Not online, but still very useful:

• The suite of JE/EJ, JJ, and thesauruses that come bundled with Mac OS X

I find that I don’t need much else these days, but if I need bigger and better dictionaries then I will likely invest in standalone PC or paper ones.

Ok, what if I needed portability? Here is what I would think about:

• Forget pen input entirely. It’s a waste of time for most kanji, especially if you don’t know the correct stroke orders. The fastest way to search for kanji is search by component name (部品読み検索). Of course this assumes that you know the names of kanji radicals. This assumption may not apply to you, but I recommend learning them if you’re serious about kanji proficiency.
• Kōjien and Kanjigen are the bare necessities for me. Some models substitute Daijirin (大辞林), which I find to be extremely limited in comparison.
• I don’t need color screens, 1-seg tuners, media readers, etc. If I was even remotely interested in that, I’d jump straight to a proper multimedia device like an iPod touch, an Eee PC, or something like that.
• “Bonus” dictionaries like English phrasebooks (とっさの英会話 or whatever), encyclopedias, etc. are also irrelevant to me.
• After considering the above items, the only other spec I really look at is the number of words in the English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries. I don’t have a preference regarding Genius vs. Progressive vs. whatever, but some dictionaries are surprisingly limited.

So, those are my thoughts on electronic dictionaries. My needs are fairly different from the average language learner, but hopefully this will be useful to someone.

PS. I lied. I actually do use a dictionary on-the-go occasionally. It’s the crappy JJ one that came with my AU phone. But it often doesn’t have the words I’m looking for, so I wouldn’t recommend basing a cell phone purchase on this particular feature.

Problems with the new ESTA

The US has just deployed a new weapon against those evil foreigners who hate our freedoms so much. Now we’re going to keep all you terrorists out by making it too annoying to enter the country.

Enter the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). In a nutshell, almost all non-US citizens from visa-waiver countries (including Japan) have to register online before entering the US. You can read all about the details elsewhere.

I took a look at the Japanese version of the website and noticed some very large holes in the implementation.

• The translation is confusing and broken in parts. There were sentences that just cut off halfway through.

• Due to the details of Japanese text input on computers, you have to specifically tell users to enter single-byte characters in text forms, and actually enforce the this requirement with proper input validation because many people don’t really understand the difference. This is unless, of course, you’re prepared to handle double-byte alphanumerics on the back end. (Example: ABC123 is single-byte, ＡＢＣ１２３ is double-byte. More info on Wikipedia.)

  Anyway, the form tells you to enter your info in the Latin alphabet (rōmaji), but nowhere does it specify single-byte. I wanted to test the form to see how well it coped with double-byte characters, but I didn’t want the DHS knocking down my door in the middle of the night.

• The website is not designed with mobile access in mind (or so I assume; I couldn’t even connect to the site on my AU phone). Many, many Japanese people don’t have PCs, and do all their internet activities on their mobile phones with very limited browsers.
• The website does no geo sniffing and ignores preferred language settings, defaulting to English and throwing up a giant legalese JavaScript popup. Talk about unfriendly.

Ultimately I suspect that people will end up leaving all this bullshit to travel agents, and very few people will personally deal with the system on any level (unless that’s not allowed for some reason).

Even if they fix the above problems, I think that this is yet another highly unnecessary act of security theater that will accomplish nothing but to annoy people, waste tax dollars, and serve as another potential vector for personal information to be lost or stolen.

USA! USA! USA!

Romanizing Japanese addresses

There was a follup question to my previous post about Japanese place names. How do I write Japanese addresses in English?

The answer: I use full rōmaji, not dropping suffixes, and not translating anything. For example:

〒231-0017
神奈川県横浜市中区港町1丁目1番地

This would be

1-1 Minato-chō, Naka-ku
Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa-ken
231-0017

Some points on this:

• Translating certain elements into English, like “Kanagawa Prefecture,” “Naka Ward,” etc. is far too much trouble. “Naka Ward, City of Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture” has a lot of unnecessary verbiage.
  • Plus, this is Japan. Addresses should be written in Japanese (rōmaji is one of the officially recognized writing systems for Japanese, so no, I’m not advocating that the whole world learns kanji). If English addresses are allowed, then why not French, German, and so on? How many languages should a Japanese postal worker need to do his or her job?
• Some people remove suffixes like “-chō,” “-shi,” and “-ken,” but this creates consistency problems. There are lots of names that require the suffixes for disambiguation—the usual suspects (cities and prefectures that share names) and others (I live in Kanagawa-ku in Yokohama-shi in Kanagawa-ken). And sometimes the suffix is part of the name (like any 〜本町 -honchō), so you either have to neuter the place name or leave only some suffixes on.

So that’s the rationale. Now if you’d like some quick and to-the-point rules for romanizing addresses, here are the guidelines I wrote for Wikipedia:

Japanese addresses should be written “Western style”, where the order of specificity is ‘’specific” to ”general”, e.g.

{building number} {neighborhood}, {ku, city / town, district}, {prefecture}

For example, 愛媛県西宇和郡伊方町湊浦123番地 should be

123 Minatoura, Ikata-chō, Nishiuwa-gun, Ehime-ken

This is the opposite of Japanese style. Other things to note:

• Include, but do not translate, suffixes such as -ken, -shi, -chō, -gun.
• Drop 丁目 (chōme), 番地 (banchi), etc. and include only the numbers, hyphenated. E.g. 1丁目2番地3号室 should be ”1-2-3”.
  • Note that when the neighborhood’s name contains a number, the neighborhood should not be reduced to that number. E.g. 三番町 should be ”Sanban-chō”, not ”3”.
• Include 甲 (kō), 乙 (otsu), 耕地 (kōchi), etc. after the ”banchi” numbers.
• 大字 (ōaza) and 字 (aza) should be treated as prefixes to the ”neighborhood” part of the address.
• Linebreaks are not required between any address elements.

With all that said, however, I should note that the closest to an official recommendation would be whatever Japan Post uses. According to their English website, they seem to use the same system except they drop the suffixes on prefecture names.

Either way, I’m sure your mail will arrive.

On translating place names

This post has a lot more to do with my previous job as CIR in Ikata than it does with my current job translating video games. Nevertheless, I’ve thought a lot about this subject, and some people may find it useful, so here we go.

One of my pet peeves in Japan is the way Japanese place names (cities, towns, mountains, rivers, etc.) are written in English, particularly on street signs and maps. There are really two issues to deal with here: Municipality names, and tautological names. Let’s start with municipality names.

First, some background: In Japan, there are three official designations for municipalities, in ascending order of size:

• Village (村 mura)
• Town (町 machi or chō)
• City (市 shi)

My pet peeve is when “City” (or “Town” or “Village”) is appended to the city name. For instance, a street sign for 横浜市 (Yokohama-shi) will say “Yokohama City.” This is bad. Unfortunately even Google has recently started down this path:

Why is it bad? Well, the actual place name (地名 chimei) is “Yokohama.” Yes, the 市 means city, but in English we don’t append “city” to a place name unless “city” is actually part of the name, like Kansas City. For almost all Japanese cities, “city” is not, and should not, be part of the name. The only exception is cities which share the name of their surrounding prefecture, such as Shizuoka, Aomori, Chiba, etc. Like Kansas City, these should be “Shizuoka City,” etc., for disambiguation purposes.

And the same goes double for towns. I worked in “Ikata Town” for two years, and the phrase made me cringe every time. To the best of my knowledge, “town” is never a suffix in the English language, outside of a few special examples like “Chinatown.” Village doesn’t sound quite so bad, but it should also not be appended.

To reiterate, “city,” “town,” and “village” should not be appended to municipality names. If you’re not already convinced, here are some supporting points:

• The distinction between the Japanese legal definitions of “city,” “town,” and “village” is irrelevant to English speakers. Anyone who is aware of the difference can already read the Japanese.
• It just sounds bad. For instance, you never see “Minneapolis City,” even though the Japanese rendering (ミネアポリス市) has the same 市 suffix. A vote for “Yokohama City” is a vote for “Minneapolis City.”

Of course sometimes you need to refer to a municipal government by name, or need to distinguish between a town and a city of the same name. In that case, use “City of” as a prefix, as in City of Kansas City, City of Minneapolis, etc. “Town of” and “Village of,” as prefixes, also work nicely.

Second issue: Tautological names. A tautological place name is a name in which two or more parts of the name are synonymous. I don’t like them because they’re redundant. For example, I remember going to a waterfall in Shizuoka with an English name written as “Shiraitonotaki Falls.” The Japanese name is 白糸の滝 (Shiraito no taki), where taki means “waterfall.” So “Shiraitonotaki Falls” really means “Shiraito Falls Falls.” This is bad.

In general, I remove suffixes (eliminate redundancies) when translating names like these. However, sometimes the suffixes form an integral part of the name, such as the Mount Gassan (月山 Gassan) or Kamegaike Pond (亀ヶ池 Kamegaike). Some names become too short* when the suffix is removed, such as the Arakawa River (荒川 Arakawa). For these, I leave the name tautological in deference to aesthetic appeal.

*”Too short” is ill defined. As a barometer, I look at how many characters remain in the name after removing the suffix. If only one character remains, it’s too short.

Let’s switch gears and think about why bad translations, like “Yokohama City,” are made. I suspect it goes like this:

1. Japanese person with little or no English ability is nevertheless tasked with coming up with the English for something or other. He or she thinks, “市 = city, so ‘Yokohama City’ must be right!” No native English speaker is consulted.
2. The above creates a precedent, and the phrase “Yokohama City” spreads like a plague onto all sorts of pamphlets, signs, materials, etc., often as part of a logo or easily-overlooked fine print. Since the pamphlet, sign, etc. is written mostly in Japanese, no native English speaker is consulted.
3. By the time a native English speaker (perhaps a JET) arrives on the scene, a huge amount of precedent already exists in the form of Japanese materials, or perhaps English materials of overall shoddy quality. He or she changes “Yokohama City” to “City of Yokohama” or just “Yokohama,” and gets a complaint from someone higher up the food chain. “Well, I guess ‘Yokohama City’ isn’t so bad,” he or she sighs, taking solace in the fact that at least the pamphlet is now comprehensible.

I urge JETs and anyone else in a position to determine official English names: Please consider my arguments above and create an English manual of style for your office if you don’t already have one. Take a look at the one I made for Ikata if you’d like some ideas. Even if you disagree with me, a manual of style is essential for keeping translations consistent (even if they’re consistently bad).

Working for the weekend

Marina Del Rey sunset

I’ve been in Los Angeles for business since the beginning of November. I have a nice apartment just five minutes from the famous Venice Beach. The weather is beautiful—there’s no better place to be in November than sunny California—but I spend pretty much all day every day in a recording studio. Even Saturdays. I only get Sunday off to enjoy the great outdoors.

And the outdoors are great. Check out some more photos.

I’ve only been in the US for two weeks at this point, so I’m still going through a little reverse culture shock. Of course there are good things, like the food. I’ve had some great Mexican, Greek, Indian, Thai, Italian, Chinese, etc. meals that either don’t exist in Japan, or would cost at least double. (The exchange rate is certainly in my favor right now.)

But one thing I can’t stand about LA is the traffic. If the roads are empty I can make it to work in about 7 minutes, but going home the other day took over 30 minutes. In absolute terms that’s not bad at all, but a 300% variation in transit time? If I had to deal with this every day I think I’d go nuts. I guess I’ve been spoiled by Japan’s public transportation.

Moving along

Yokohama by night

It’s been quite a while, so quick update:

• I left my CIR position in Ikata and took a job in Yokohama, localizing video games.
• I’m in Los Angeles on business for most of November. Sunny California is a good place to be in November!
• I moved my blog to… here!

So there you go—the last few months of my life summed up in three sentences.

Captured! Again!

I sat front-and-center at the opening session of a job fair recently, and was rewarded with my mug in an article in the Nikkei Business newspaper.

Where’s Waldo Aaron?

Front row at the JETAA Job Fair

1000 km

I’ve run 1000 km.

(Not all at once, of course.)

HDR, too!

Mountaintop photographer

HDR photography seems all the rage these days, so I thought I’d try my hand at it too. I thought I needed a fancier camera, but it turns out really all you need is to use the simple exposure adjustments that most cameras have.

So far all of my HDR photos have been from handheld shots, and they’ve turned out ok (especially at smaller sizes). On top of that, the software is all free! I used the Gimp and JD Smith’s excellent exposure-blend extension. So you, out there with your cheap point-and-shoot and $0 software budget, can do it too! Barriers to entry don’t get much lower than this.

But, I should say that aligning your shots is tricky without a tripod. I hope to get one one of these days.