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!

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: Update: At some point Google’s maps were updated to drop “city” suffixes.

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).

MacBook report

My new MacBook arrived last night, much to my relief. Even though people in Japan do it all the time, I don’t like carrying around huge amounts of cash.

After 24 hours, here are my gripes (because I’m much better at griping than just about anything else), both about Leopard and about the MacBook.

• Time Machine doesn’t like my external hard drive. I have a 320GB external FireWire hard drive with two partitions, one for data and one for backup. I successfully set Time Machine to use the backup partition, then let it go. It repeatedly stalls a couple gigs into the backup, then one-by-one system services start being flaky. Eventually everything stops responding and I have to force reboot. Boo. (Edit: This seems to be fixed in 10.5.1.)
• The 3D Dock style sucks. Luckily you can switch to 2D style by entering defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock in the Terminal.
• Displaying folder contents instead of folder icons in the Dock is the stupidest thing ever. (Edit: This was later made optional.)
• Stacks and Grid view are sort of ok, but I prefer the original behavior. Please give us the old behavior as an option! (Edit: This was sort of addressed eventually.)
• The menubar transparency is distracting. (Edit: This was later made optional.)
• The new scheme for specifying individual window view preferences is beyond stupid. I shouldn’t have to say “FTFF” 7 years after 10.0 was released.
• Front Row lets you browse your ~/Movies folder, which is great. It doesn’t, however, let you browse your ~/Pictures folder; instead you’re limited to viewing the contents of your iPhoto library. That seems like something of an oversight.
• While everything is much faster than my old iBook G4, the MacBook still chokes at things that it shouldn’t—switching between resource-intensive apps, for instance. Since I can see my CPU isn’t being pegged, I suppose that means it’s swapping RAM out (I can’t hear it because the hard drive is so quiet); the stock 1GB must not be enough (I’ve got 1GB of swap without having run anything particularly demanding), but that’s kind of annoying coming from my iBook where 1GB was enough.
• The USB ports are even closer together than the iBook’s, where things were already not quite fitting in. Now I can’t have my iPod and my Logitech mouse plugged in at the same time. Obnoxious.
• In general the machine is very quiet, but when the fans reach full speed (Spotlight indexing seems to be a major cause of this) they sound like jet engines.

I’m sure I’ll think of more stuff soon.

Edit: I can’t believe there’s no way to have Front Row run on an external display without either turning on mirroring or switching main screens. Very disappointing.

Edit: A new first: My keyboard stopped working. Entirely. Across the whole system. I didn’t install or run anything weird. Fixed by rebooting. (Edit: Fixed by a MacBook keyboard system update.)

Fabulous Feisty Fawn

Sorry I haven’t been posting here much lately. While things were busted for a bit I started using my mixi diary, and it became a little bit habit-forming. Not that it’s all that amazing technologically, it’s just that my audience in Japan tends to only have internet access on their cell phones, and so have a hard time reading any blogs that aren’t specifically tuned to be viewed on devices with small screens and expensive bandwidth.

I’m going to go HyperNerd™ on you guys for a sec, so bear with me.

Windows 98

When I arrived in Ikata, my office computer was a PII running Win98 on an ISDN line. (Note: For those of you who don’t speak Nerd, that means “bad”.) It was practically unusable.

I bitched to the right person, and sat back while important people were consulted, budgets were calculated, palms were greased, consensus was built, clocks ticked, paint dried, empires rose and fell, etc. In the end, the enchanted accounting fairies granted me one (1) computer, for external use only.

After a month of taking bids from vendors, then waiting for the machine to arrive, it was promptly placed on my desk and immediately ignored. For another month.

A typical Monday morning in the office

Repeatedly sighing (not-so)-under-my-breath, my frustration again reached the ears of my guardian angel, who dragged the IT troll out of his cave up to set up my machine and plug me into the World Wide Cybermation Superspaceway.

I was on my way to productivity when I noticed that he had locked down Windows so tight that I couldn’t actually do my job. He wouldn’t let me install applications, despite the fact that the standard tools of office slavery are completely irrelevant to what I do. I practically had to torture him to get the proxy info so I could test the English website in Firefox.

So what did I do? I promptly slapped Ubuntu Linux on the other partition and mentally flipped the IT troll a nice big bird. As hard as I could.

But all was not happy in the land of Edgy Eft. My computer was too new (imagine that!) for the video drivers to work properly, so Google Earth wouldn’t work. And I couldn’t even see the networked printers, much less print to them. Thus began several long months of dual-booting, switching to Windows every time I had to print.

Until today. Today I finally upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04, née Funky Fink Fresh Fosbury Flapping Fanny Feisty Fawn, and now Google Earth works and I can see the printers and after a bit of finagling the poorly-packaged Canon printer drivers (though your execution sucks, thank you for making Linux drivers), I can now print!

The moral of the story: I win IT.

Me doing what I do best

Oh no you di’int!

I’m not sure what the proper notation is for that neck-swaying, finger-snappin’, attitudinous phrasing of “Oh no you didn’t” that’s so popular these days. Just try to imagine it. Here’s a Christmas Anecdote™ that has nothing to do with Christmas:

I was at one of my elementary schools eating lunch. School lunch here is interesting. It’s either got a big bowl of rice, or about half a baguette as the main calorie source. (Note: The ridiculously oversized bread in school lunch is intimately related to the Japanese myth that all foreigners eat almost nothing but bread.) Beyond that, there’s usually a soup of some sort, maybe a meager salad, maybe some sort of fried, dead animal. And sometimes a dessert item. Oh, and always, always a box of whole milk, which I can’t stand.

This particular day, there was the loaf of bread, some other stuff, and an apple-flavored dessert gelatin. I had trudged halfway through my mile-long tube of bread when I decided I’d like to try a bite of my apple-flavored dessert gelatin. No sooner had I put the spoon in my mouth than the kids around me gasp and start yelling, “OOOOOOHHH! Teacher, he didn’t finish his bread! He has to finish his bread before he eats his apple-flavored dessert gelatin!”

“Little fuckers,” I thought, “I’ll show them.” So I took a big spoonful of apple-flavored dessert gelatin and slurped it loudly and exaggeratedly, moaning in pleasure at the delicious apple flavor. This drew more laughter than shocked gasps.

Then the coup de grâce: I spread some of the apple-flavored dessert gelatin on my unfinished industrial pylon of bread and ate it, again making a big show of how delicious it was. The kids nearly shit themselves. The teacher looked like she was going to explode with laughter. I honestly think I snapped some neurons in their heads.

The point of this story is that elementary school in Japan is less a school and more a programming factory designed to format the brains of little Japanese kids into believing that A) there is one correct way to do everything, B) all alternate methods are evil, and C) anyone not following the correct method must be forced to comply with said method.

Examples I have noticed so far:

Battling with breadsticks

• You must finish your American Gladiators’ battle lance of bread before moving on to dessert.
• You must eat your bread by ripping off one bite’s worth at a time, never dipping it in any soup or foreign flavor substance.
• You must not leave as much as one single grain of rice in your bowl.
• You must not mix any foreign flavor substance, such as leftover curry sauce, into your rice, because doing so is, and I quote, “dirty”.
• You must chew every mouthful of food exactly 30 times. There are posters detailing the numerous (and in my opinion, dubious) benefits of this in every school’s lunchroom.
• You must not talk or sing during cleaning time, regardless of how mindless the task may be.
• You must not walk with your hands in your pockets, no matter how cold it is, because, and I quote, “you might fall and hurt yourself”.
• You must brush your teeth after every meal, even at school, though you need not use toothpaste or floss.

I’m sure I’ll remember some more later. For now, this is FOREIGN HUMANOID UNIT ID #45AX WISHING ALL OTHER HUMANOID UNITS AN ACCEPTABLE WINTER-SYSTEM-SHUTDOWN-AND-CALENDAR-INCREMENT PERIOD.

Hey kids, propaganda!

I just saw an awful anime movie called “The Laws of Eternity” (永遠の法 Eien no hō). It was basically a propaganda machine meant to indoctrinate Japanese children to believe the following:

• Atheists are agents of evil trying to spread human misery
• Science isn’t about the systematic analysis of the physical world, but is a political tool to be used to further culture and civilization (according to a specific agenda)
• All of the world religions are really just various manifestations of Buddhism
• People aren’t to be judged just by their actions, but by their thoughts as well (beware the thought police)
• Women are meant to give themselves selflessly to the service of others
• Men are meant to work hard and become captains of industry
• Though all people should be judged by their actions and thoughts, men alone can ultimately be evaluated solely by the outcomes of their careers (specifically, Thomas Edison was depicted as a high-ranking angel despite having in real life tortured animals as part of a feud with Nikolai Tesla, among other misdeeds)
• Nietzsche is in league with Hitler in the deepest depths of hell
• Hitler, in the deepest depths of hell, leads an army of undead soldiers and one gigantic evil elephant
• Foreigners are impure of thought, and therefore unsuited to enter the highest levels of heaven
• Black people are bumbling goofballs
• White people are cold-hearted, cynical bastards
• Japanese people are pure of heart and mind, and can therefore be admitted to the highest levels of heaven
• Japanese men are strong, stoic, hard-working, and righteous
• Japanese women are pretty, frail, loving, and always stand by their men

I’m sure I’ll remember some more, but suffice it to say that this movie was 100% preachy tripe. I definitely wouldn’t want my kids watching this until they’re old enough to appreciate the politics being pushed here.

Wafoo!® JAPAN

最近よくテレビで見るケンタッキーの CM に、草彅剛が着物姿で出て、ケンタッキーの新メニュー「和風なんとかチキン」を正座しながら美味しそうにパリパリかじり、「日本人でよかったぁ〜」という言葉を漏らす。

んんん何だと？ちょっと待った。外資系のファストフード店が（しかも KFC みたいなどアメリカンなやつが）フライドチキンの名に〈和風〉をつけてごまか何かを表面にかけただけで、日本人は一体なにを誇るべきというのかな？　と伺うとまた不可解な日本人論が出てきそうなのでやめよう。

昨日お世話になった先生と一緒に、山に囲まれている農業が盛んな街のとてもお上品な和食のお店で食事をしていたら、感想を聞かれて、なにかひたすら和風な発言を考えないと！と思って言った。「この食事で、山の幸と海の幸の違いがよくわかったような気がします。」みんな激しくうなずきながら「ふうぅ〜ん」と納得したようなため息をついた。　・・・　あれでよかった？合格とみてくれたのかな？

気がつけば、デタラメな発言でわびさびを究めたフリをし大和魂を気取っている僕がいた。

Crunch time

Things got interesting last night. And by interesting, I mean potentially injurious.

I was in the not-so-nearby town of Ōzu visiting a friend. I made a left turn onto a horribly narrow little road, and accidentally scraped my car against an until-then invisible guardrail. The left side of my Daihatsu MOVE is now a bit scratched up and slightly more concave than before. It still drives fine, though.

Visions of multi-hundred dollar repair bills floated before my eyes as I reported the incident to the yakubizzle. They of course wanted to see the car to assess the damage themselves. I brought it in after my elementary school visit.

The section chief took one look at it and said, “It’s an old car, and the damage is pretty light. What do you think?” I told him that if it were my car, I wouldn’t bother fixing it. We then explained the situation to the insurance specialist: “I hit a guardrail.” “Yeah, that’ll happen.”

The conclusion: The car is due for shaken in Feburary; we’ll have it repaired then. In other words, I’m off the hook.

Later I was discussing with a contemporary of mine the fact that Japanese people don’t get wet when it rains.

M

The streets [in Tokyo] are super narrow too. It was raining today and I had to keep raising my umbrella just to let the cars pass.

Me

yeah, rain in tokyo sucks ass. the only way you won’t get wet is if you’re already wet. then you at least can’t get wetter.

M

Seriously!! And the Japanese people didn’t look wet at all. what the heck is up with that?? Are Japanese people naturally scotch guarded or something?

Me

they are somehow impervious to everything about their climate.

M

[A friend] and I were observing what was going on. All the gaijin were DRENCHED and these little urban princesses were walking around in their open-toe 3 inch heels and looking sassy. bitches.

Me

sometimes i think they’re not even corporeal, but are actually lost souls doomed to roam the island for all eternity.

M

Nothing is more fun than dissing the Japanese. I’m sorry, but it’s just hours of fun filled entertainment

Me

they bring it on themselves

M

I think so yes

Fascists against drunk driving

First of all I’d like to state that I am not in favor of drunk driving.

However, I read something in the paper today that made me mad: Japanese auto makers, particularly Nissan, are apparently moving to introduce devices that prevent a car from starting up if the driver has consumed alcohol. Suggested devices to be made requirements for starting the car:

1. A brethalyzer tube on the dashboard into which you must blow, or
2. inputting a long, complicated PIN that would be too difficult to enter while drunk.

This is just stupid. I’m not going to take a goddamn breathalyzer every time I want to start my car, and I’m not memorizing some obnoxious password.

The impetus for these draconian measures is the “skyrocketing” DUI-related death rate in Japan. The actual numbers listed in the article? About 1200 cases in 2002 or 2003, and a full 700-some cases in 2005. Let’s compare with the US: According to MADD, there were 17,448 people killed in alcohol related crashes in 2001. Unless 14.5 people were killed in every single incident in Japan, I don’t think they’re even freaking close. Yes, Japan has half the population of the US; yes, we’re not comparing apples to apples here (number of drunken driving incidents that led to death vs. number of drunk driving deaths), but first of all, this is clearly not a pressing social problem. And drunk driving deaths are not skyrocketing if, as the article stated, there was a 38% drop over the last 3 years.

Won’t somebody please think of the children!?! Let’s give up our personal freedoms just to appease a bunch of knee-jerking soccer moms and some auto manufacturers that want to sell us yet another must-have feature next to the LCD TV, DVD player, CD player, GPS navigation system, collision detection, backup camera, automated-parallel-parking, satellite-hookup black box / Big Brother surveilance system, and so on.

There is already a zero tolerance policy for drunk driving here. Everyone knows that. This is already overkill (how about something a little more reasonable like in the US?) Is inconveniencing every single non-drunk driving person in the country worth it? Is it going to stop the misanthropes who knowingly get behind the wheel while tipsy? How about the research that says driving while talking on a cell phone is worse than driving drunk?” Are we going to have anti-cellphone devices installed in cars too? Speaking of which, that’s one of my pet peeves. Shut the fuck up and drive, asshole. If you’re so important you have to use the cell and drive at the same time, you can afford a goddamn chauffeur.

手相ジジイ / Palm-reading geezer

このあいだ役場で仕事をしていたら、変なおじいさんがやってきて、急に僕の手相を読み始めた。「なんだこのぼけジジイ」と思いながら手のひらを広げられて、「あんたは特に頭がいいわけでも才能があるわけでもないね、生命線も短い」とか言われちゃった。それから酵素がどうのこうのとか、「生ものが体にええわい」とか延々と健康の話を聞かされて、普通に質問に答えたら「しかしあんたの日本語、大したもんだな」とか。お前さっき才能ないって言ったろうが、人の仕事を邪魔して勝手につじつまの合わない変なことほざいてんじゃねえよ（激）

すみません、ちょっとしたストレス解消でした。

久々に、完全にバイリンガルな書き込みにしよう。 Let’s make this a fully bilingual post for once.

I was working at the town hall the other day when a weird old guy came by and started reading my palm. “What’s with this geezer?” I thought as he spread my palm flat. He then informed me that I’m “not particularly smart or skilled,” and my life line is “pretty short.” Then he started going on about enzymes and this and that, and how “raw foods are good for the body,” and when I answered some simple questions he said “Your Japanese is pretty impressive, sonny.” Didn’t you just tell me I’m not smart or skilled? What the hell are you doing interrupting peoples’ work and feeding them this nonsensical bullshit?

Sorry, I just had to relieve some stress there.