Listen to the Rain

一羽の鳥が鳴いている
名前のない空に私を探して
優しさで編み続けた
ゆりかごで明日へいこう
晴れの日も雨の日にも
あなたを守るために

"Your voice is my guidepost / A lone bird is crying out / searching for me in the nameless sky / The kindness I've woven / into a cradle will bear me into tomorrow / On clear days and rainy days too / So I can protect you."

I've listened to that song roughly two hundred times in the last day, so it's definitely on my mind.

I went to the discussion about Violet Evergarden, my notes about which I posted here, and unlike the time when I went to the discussion about Your Lie in April, this time I broadly agreed with everyone's else opinion. We talked about the beautiful art--here's one of the standout parts, where Violet walks on water (very briefly)--the emotional journey that Violet makes over the course of the show and how her almost-robotic demeanor in the beginning serves her later growth, how glad we were that the Major didn't come back at the end and undo most of her development, and how great the music was. I'm in agreement with all of that, and now I want to track down the light novel the anime was based on. I've heard it's full of anime bullshit--in a pseudo-European setting, Violet Evergarden fights with an eight-foot-long axe named "Witchcraft" with which she can deflect bullets--but you know, some anime bullshit is par for the course, I guess. And it'll be good Japanese practice.

Earlier this week I saw on Twitter that there was an exhibit at the Art Institute called The Mezzotints of Hamanishi Katsunori closing today, so after work on Thursday I went to the Art Institute's free day. I didn't get any good pictures of his work, but you can see some examples here. Apparently mezzotinting is layering black over the canvas and then scraping it off gradually to lighten certain areas. Maybe that's why some of them seemed almost three-dimensional, popping off the canvas in a way that I definitely couldn't capture with my iPhone camera. The art is part of the museum's collection, so maybe it'll rotate out on display again soon.

I did take this picture elsewhere in the Japanese art section of a sakura tree. It's that time of year:

( 桜 )

Tomorrow--today Japan time--they're release the new Imperial Era name. I'm actually kind of in suspense. It's going from 平成 (Heisei, "Peace Everywhere," from a Chinese classical reference, apparently), to...who knows. 昭和 was also about peace, so maybe it'll be another peace reference? I can't wait!

Live update, as I am writing this: 令和 reiwa. Maybe "Peaceful law"? It could be "Commanded to peace," but that seems harsh for an era name.

My book club has been reading Sin in the Second City, about a Chicago brothel at the turn of the 20th century. The most mind-blowing part of the book is the claim that the verb "to get laid" comes from the Everleigh Club, the aforementioned brothel, about which patrons would say they were "going to get Everleighed," and after the club's closure the Ever was dropped and the spelling changed. I always figured it was from "to lay down"! Language is amazing.

That's everyting that happened lately. I spent most of this weekend watching Violet Evergarden--I left it all for the last minute and had to watch the whole thing last night and this morning--went to Starlight Radio Dreams on Friday, stopped by [Bad username or site: @ twitter.com name=]'s apartment briefly on Thursday to eat some of her surfeit of dessert, and otherwise there's not much to report.

Less week seems more laid back at the moment, but we'll see!

That is the real name of a real incident in the Japanese Diet, though it's also often rendered as the "You Idiot Statement."

I get weird notifications from Coffee Meets Bagel, and today I got one about something called バカヤローの日 (baka yarō no hi, "fucking idiot day"). I thought it was a dumb joke, but it turns out it's real, or at least as real as neko no hi is. It's based on an exchange between Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru of the Liberal Democratic Party and Nishimura Eiichi of the Social Democratic Party of Japan in 1953, where the prime minister was asked a question and responded by calling Nishimura a fucking idiot.

drydem asked exactly what the question was, and I looked up further context. It turns out that there's a page on Japanese Wikipedia about it, whose name translates to "The 'Fucking Idiot' Parliamentary Dissolution." Isn't politics great?

Here's the exchange, in the original and translation.

( Read more... )
The dissolution came two weeks later on March 14th after the Social Democratic Party of Japan introduced a censure motion and most of the Liberal Democratic Party didn't show up to the vote.

Sometimes, politics is fun!

Edit: On reflection, "fucking idiot" might be too strong, but "you idiot" is too weak. Japanese isn't as good for swearing as English is--there's a blog I read that has a whole blog post [link in Japanese] about how she doesn't really understand the visceral impact of the way English-speakers use "fucking" as an insult--but maybe something like "dumbass"? Translation is hard.

I had an impromptu weekend this week thanks to the extremely low temperatures. On Monday, we got an email saying that the building was going to be closed on Wednesday. Just before end-of-day on Tuesday, we got another email saying that the building would also be closed on Thursday. Guidelines were that if we had a meeting, we should call in to attend; if we had a laptop and work we could do, bring it home to work; but otherwise, do nothing. Since my job involves a lot of physicians' personal information, I can only do it if I'm physically present, which meant I got two days off. No complaints from me.

I woke up at 7 a.m. yesterday despite not having an alarm set and then spent much of the day playing Darkest Dungeon. I was originally going to go over to lisekatevans's place to make lunch, but we pushed it back to dinner so I had my salad for lunch (the one I made to eat at work), took a Lyft over around 3:30 and worked on transcribing more Wild Man Blues, and downloaded OmegaT and started the process of translation. I would have just used LibreOffice with two parallel columns, but according to everything I found on the internet that's basically impossible. There's no way to have a left column that runs on the left from the beginning to the end of the document, but OmegaT was recommended in response to someone who had exactly the same question I did, so I tried it out.

So far it's pretty great! It takes in a source document(s), splits it up into a series of smaller segments, each of which is isolated and individually translatable, and then outputs a translated document in the same format. You can leave notes, put in a glossary of neologisms or other terms that need referencing, add alternate translations for certain terms, all kinds of quality of life functions I wouldn't get in LibreOffice even if parallel columns were possible. I'm only a few paragraphs in, but I can already see that this'll make keeping track of what I did and what changes I made really easy.

For dinner, lisekatevans helped with ingredient prep and I made miso nikomi soba. The traditional recipe uses udon, but part of the point was for lisekatevans to use up her extra noodles and soba was what she had. Picture below:

( Brothy deliciousness )

The first time I made miso nikomi udon, it was when I first moved to Japan. It was about 35°C outside, with 95% humidity, and I was in an uninsulated house in the middle of a bunch of rice fields (visible on Google Streetview here!), and by the time I was halfway through the bowl I was sweating buckets. lisekatevans's place was warm, but with the icy cold of death outside, it was a lot better environment to each hot soup. She broke out the bottle of sake I gave her last month, called her roommate over, and we sat and ate. It was delicious.

Going home was awful, though. I figured I could risk taking the L, since it wasn't a long distance, but even with a five-minute walk I felt like I could never take a full breath. Breathing deeply set me coughing, so I took shallow breaths and hunched over against the wind until I got on the L where the air was warmer. I didn't freeze, though, and here I am.

I also vacuumed and mopped the apartment yesterday, so while I was mostly trapped inside, it was a clean inside.

Today I have nothing planned until the evening, when Anime Chicago is still planning to have a meetup at a place called Beermiscuous. I was talking with my Japanese tutor about it and she said it didn't even sound like an English word, but I don't know. I think it sounds exactly like some weird neologism that people would come up with. Like a more proactive version of beer goggles. I don't like beer at all--it's the carbonation--but they do have a small amount of whiskey and wine, so maybe I'll get something.

Alright, time for more translating while watching Continue? play through Final Fantasy VII.

I generally don't write much, if anything, about games while I'm playing them, but Breath of the Wild is a special case. I've already spent three times as much time playing it as I have the single longest amount of time it took me to beat any previous Zelda game (Skyward Sword, 35 hours), and I've been spending the time exploring the whole map and tracking down shrines, visiting stables and doing sidequests, buying a house, tracking down Koroks, and otherwise avoiding all the vital tasks that I should be doing. But I finally got through most of the map and I'm close to getting all the Koroks I need to unlock all my bag slots, so I finally went to the Zora's domain to speak to the prince, like the various Zora scattered around asked me to do like eighty hours of gameplay ago.

That means I met the prince of the Zora, and now I understand the memes:
( Read more... )

I usually use that phrase about Yasunori Mitsuda's ouevre, but it turns out it applies elsewhere.

Back when we lived in Japan, we were wandering through Hiroshima City one day when we heard music, the unmistakable sound of fiddles and hand-drums. I thought it sounded like Celtic music and started walking toward it, and we found a plaza with a band playing and stayed to listen as twilight fell. They were here, in the plaza just south of Parco Department Store. I originally thought it was the plaza where we joined in a Bon dance on an hot August night, but that was here, quite different.

Ever since then, I think about it sometimes but I could never remember the name of the band. A photo of the band from 2011 popped up today in my Facebook memories, and this time I checked the comments and they had the band's name--Drakskip. Here's their website.

For years I've thought they were a Celtic band, but I was wrong! Their about section says:

Drakskipの音楽は北欧を中心に世界中の音楽を取り込んで、そのサウンドは躍動的、前衛的でありながらもどこか懐かしい。

In English:

Drakskip's music takes in music from around the world, but its heart is from Northern Europe, and the sound is lively and avant-garde while being somehow nostalgic.

Their recent news has them spending a year studying in Sweden. I guess the fiddles threw me off.

I want to see if I can buy one of their albums. Amazon.jp only has CDs, so maybe I'll check Japanese iTunes. I know it's possible to buy gift cards and use that to get music...

My Japanese tutor pointed out that I had been getting sick a lot this year, and she's right. Though, I think this year has been more stressful than most. I called in sick today and I'm not sure if I should have, but I felt pretty terrible this morning. My throat hurt whether I was swallowing or not and even drinking gallons of tea didn't seem to help. It's feeling a bit better now, but the throat pain has been replaced with a cough. Great.

I finally took the plunge and created a Tumblr I've been wanting to for a while: zerudanihongo. It's all screenshots I've taken in my playthrough of Legend of Zelda games with translations of the text by me. It's yet another avenue to keeping in practice, since every little bit helps. Follow it if you like.

I'm going to see a stage performance of Neverwhere this weekend put on by Lifeline Theatre, which is not the same place I saw a stage adaptation of Wyrd Sisters even though I was sure that it was. I've seen a couple reviews that say there's too much story packed into the running time, but maybe I won't mind as much since I read the book.

Haven't turned the aircon on yet since spring finally came to Chicago after a brief interlude of summer. It's currently 20°C, which makes it pleasantly cool as long as I leave a window open. I should have done that in previous years, since even though the heat is now fixed, the aircon has never worked all that well. Years here and I still don't know where the leaks are...

Just need to wait and see if I get a response now.

I asked a few people if they wanted to watch 君の名は/Your Name with me and no one could come, but I had heard such good things about it (much like Black Panther) that I wasn't willing to wait, so I watched it myself.

What an amazing movie.

Spoilers: ( Read more... )

First to UI improvements, and now to problems with required training. We're supposed to take a suite of courses about various aspects of the organization, and some of them have video sections. I hate the pivot to video--I can read much faster than I listen--but fine, sure, whatever. The problem is that my computer now is a tiny box with no speakers, so I couldn't actually listen to anything. I still passed the one course I took with 100% because it was about finance and I do all the budgets, but I didn't want to trust to my pre-existing knowledge, so I wrote in asking about transcripts. They didn't provide that, but they did come over, notice that I have lightning headphones since I have an iPhone 7, and bought 3.5 mm headphones for me to do the courses.

Good for them. Transcripts would be better for accessibility reasons, but the typical corporate response would be to tell me to watch it on my own time at home. In our current cyberpunk dystopic hell, I'm glad I actually got a useful response, even if much of the material the response is for is pointless.

I found a horror manga on Tumblr that I really liked. It's short, with a twist. I've included it and a translation below:

( Clicky for spooky )

I'm looking forward to Super Mario Odyssey coming out this weekend. I took a long weekend because I had a few extra vacation days that I needed to use, not even realizing that it was the same weekend as the first new 3D Mario platformer in years. I'm not going to get absorbed into it, though, because I'm only going to play it while schoolpsychnerd is around. We played through all of Super Mario Galaxy together, me controlling Mario and schoolpsychnerd shooting stars at my enemies, and since Super Mario Odyssey has a similar low-stress co-op mod, I want the chance to play together. I also still want to play a couple horror games before the month is out. I've spent the whole month playing Trails in the Sky SC and Stardew Valley.

Autumn in Chicago has truly come. It's been rainy and cold, down to 8°C right now, and the leaves continue to fall. This is my favorite time of year and it's distressingly short here. It'll already be colder next week, down to freezing next week Monday morning. I'd better enjoy it while I can. 🍁

Listening to the latest episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse yesterday and they had a brief section about Night in the Woods, the adventure game about snake person angst, and included a cover of one of the songs from the protagonist's band:

Watch on YouTube

I played it for schoolpsychnerd and gave a summary of the premise as I knew it, since I knew she'd understand. She's from Paducah, and as a child she had the goal to just get out in the way that I think a lot of kids from rural areas do. I'm from the Chicago suburbs, so it never affected me the same way, but I know people who lived in those dying towns before they moved away. The factories have closed, the malls are ghost towns, and people work retail because that's all that's available and mark off the days on the calendar. I mentioned that the protagonist and her friends hang out at the hardware store for lack of anywhere else to go, and schoolpsychnerd nodded sagely.

I'm leaning towards buying the game based on how much I liked that song, honestly.

( Farmer's Market Dinner )

For class, we were supposed to discuss an article but Aya-sensei forgot to email me, so we just chatted for an hour (and I did okay! ). We're doing the article next week, though--an essay by Hirano Keiichirō entitled 無常ということ (mujou to iu koto, "On impermanence"), about the changes Kyōto has undergone, efforts against that, and what the "real Kyōto" is anyway.

One part stood out to me:

人が死ぬように、建造物も壊れる。人が移り変わるように、風景もまた絶え間なく変化する。そうした存在の絶望的な不安を慰める為にこそ、不変の聖所としての神社仏閣がかくも膨大な数築かれなければならなかったのではあるまいか

Which I would translate as

Much like humans die, buildings will crumble. Much like people change, the scenery will ceaselessly change. Surely to console that desperate existential dread, is that not why we must build temples and shrines in such huge numbers as eternal sacred spaces?

At what point does preservation become killing something and preserving it in amber? At what point does change destroy that which came before and make something completely new? I'm sure the people in the dying rural towns, both here and in Japan, would prefer there had been a bit less change, even if younger people are moving to those towns sometimes.

I haven't finished the essay, so I can't answer those questions.

Annoying male protagonists are the scourge of fiction.

So I'm reading the latest chapter of 世界の中心で、愛を叫ぶ for today's tutoring session and get to a Romeo and Juliet-esque part where Sakutarō and Aki talk about how they want to get married. Aki points out that she's only 16, and that people think that they might change their minds. Sakutarō talks about how marriage is about being able to support themselves in society and does that mean that sick people who can't support themselves shouldn't be allowed to get married (だったら病気なんかで自立できない人たちは結婚しちゃいいけないのかってことになる), referencing something that happened to his grandfather. Aki sighs at Sakutarō's tendency to jump to the extremes of any argument, and then the annoyance starts:

「社会的に自立するってどういうことだと思う？」
彼女は少し考えて、「働いて自分でお金を稼ぐってことかな」
「お金を稼ぐってどういうこと？」
「さあ」

"What do you think it means to support yourself in society?
She thought for a little, "To work and earn money, I think."
"And what does 'to earn money' mean?"
"Well."

Everyone knows the Socratic method is the best way to endear your girlfriend to you.

He then goes on to say that money is the reward for various skills, which, okay, and then goes off into left field:

「それなら人を好きになる能力に恵まれている人間は、その能力を生かして人を好きになることで、お金をもらってなぜ悪い？」
「やっぱりみんなの役に立つことじゃないと、だめなんじゃないの」
「人を好きになること以上に、みんなの役に立つことがあるとは思えないけどな」
「こういう現実離れしたことを平気で言う人を、わたしは未来の夫にしようとしているんだわ」

"If that's the case, for humans who are blessed with the ability to love other people, why is it bad to earn money by making use of that ability?"
"If it's not useful to everyone, it's no good, right?"
"I don't think there's anything more useful than the ability to love."
"And I'm trying to make someone who calmly says such off-the-wall things my future husband."

Thus demonstrating that Aki has a reasonable grasp of economics, because the ability to love has a high supply and the demand for any particular person's ability to love is low. But that's not enough for Sakutarō, since this kicks off a page-long rant about what love means and how it's better for humanity to be wiped out by a meteor if it doesn't value the ability to love.

To Aki's credit, she doesn't feed his ranting. But I can see why the English title--and apparently, the proposed Japanese title before the publisher convinced him to change it--for this book was Socrates in Love. Sakutarō's response to anything is engage in grand works of adolescent philosophy, but unlike Socrates he's lucky if his musings have any connection to anything in the real world. And Aki tolerates it, maybe even finds it endearing, but that doesn't make it fun for me to read.

Can I read a version of 世界の中心で、愛を叫ぶ from Aki's perspective?

So the American government decided to send a carrier group to the Korean peninsula as a show of force against Korean nuclear ambitions, which prompted the representatives of the Eternal Lich President to issue its own response.

And then an hour ago, I saw that nhk_kokusai had tweeted this out:

菅官房長官は、アメリカの #トランプ 政権が #北朝鮮 に対し武力行使も排除しない姿勢を示していることに関連し、アメリカや韓国と緊密に連携しながら、朝鮮半島で在留邦人の退避が必要になる場合も含め、万全な態勢を取っていると強調。https://t.co/2ll84vLzm5

— ＮＨＫ国際部 (@nhk_kokusai) April 12, 2017

Here's my translation:

Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga [Yoshihide] highlighted that, in relation to President Trump's deployment of the military toward North Korea and refusal to lift sanctions, while America and South Korea maintain their cooperation, [Japan] must be prepared in case an evacuation of Japanese citizens living on the Korean Peninsula becomes necessary.

So, they're at least admitting the possibility of another war. Remember when people assumed that our Dear Leader would be an isolationist who wouldn't go around starting wars, unlike that hawk Clinton? Those takes, as they say, did not age well.

At least Twitter will keep us entertained in the 20 minutes after the missiles launch.