Writing exercise 8

In the last post I wrote: "a paper edition of dictionary."

Aside from the apparent omission of an article in front of "dictionary," I thought it's almost correct. But just a moment ago it occurred to me that it might be wrong, so I put it on a search engine to see if it's correct, and found no matches. Then I made different combinations of the three words to see in what way I can say what I want to say in English.

On Google:

paper edition : 973,000
(a, the) dictionary of (the, a) paper edition: no matches
(a, the) paper edition of a dictionary: no matches.
dictionary in a paper edition: no matches

Maybe just because no matches are found on search engines with those expressions doesn't prove they don't make sense. But on the other hand, when I want to say the same thing in Japanese, just about every expression I can easily come up with without taking it so seriously yields at least one hundred search results or more. If you are Japanese, you can check out yourselves using any search engine out there. The first one I came up with in Japanese without much thought was "kami-ban no jisho," and it yielded more than six hundred search results, which is much more than expected. In English, the most vexing part of this is that while there are so many search results with "paper edition," an effort on the part of a non-English speaker to try to combine it with the simple word "dictionary" in whatever way it makes sense takes this much time.
Is it that there's no way to combine the three words, "dictionary, paper, edition," add a few words, and find hundreds of search results to prove they make sense?

Maybe I can just say "a printed dictionary," or "a paper dictionary."

Writing exercise 7

It looks like Japan is entering a new era as the first prime minister to be born after the WWII has taken office this week. I don’t know anything about politics nor do I like to talk politics here. Period.

One of the TV programs that intrigued me this week was an NHK news report on a controversy over whether to extend the term of posthumous copyright from the current 50 years in Japan to 70 years, which is the de facto global standard. The program centered on the pros and cons of the reform, and there seemed to be two points about the issue. One point is that shorter copyright terms obviously benefit people because they make it possible for us to read a lot of novels for free earlier than otherwise, which we’re actually doing now thanks to a few free novel sites out there, and because shorter terms will certainly contribute to furthering the proliferation of the great works through dramatization, film adaptation and so forth that can be done virtually for free. Another point is whether following the global standards on just about everything is the right thing to do, considering the obvious advantages that benefit us all. And another benefit of having shorter copyright terms that the program put emphasis on was that they make translation rights expire earlier, making an earlier publication of different translations possible for any literary work. One of the reasons we need more than one translation is that translations published in Japan are generally known to be full of mistakes, some of which can be spotted even by those with only rudimentary knowledge of the languages, as in the case of Françoise Sagan’s works, which are rumored to have made the translator as wealthy as the writer herself despite a lot of hideous mistakes in her translations. By the way, the reason I referred to Sagan here rather abruptly was that an example the program cited happened to be Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "The little prince." The French writer reminded me of Sagan. That's why. The translation right for "Le petit prince" in Japan expired only recently, just 50 years after his death, paving the way for seven or more different translations, instead of the only one that had been available for more than half a century. I think that's a very good thing from the standpoint of not the translators' profits but the spread of the great work, now interpreted in many different ways. The program also showed a bunch of Japanese writers rallying to call for the implementation of the reform, insisting that their ‘great achievements' need to be paid the fair value. I was disgusted at the scene. Their argument that their works of 'high artistic value' deserve to be given some legal privileges does not seem to make sense. And my take on this is that the current 50 years should be reduced to 25 years or less, not only for literature but for music as well.

This month I bought the Microsoft Encarta college dictionary. The last time I bought an English dictionary of this volume was more than a decade ago and it was one of Webster’s. It may be true that buying a paper edition of dictionary in this age doesn’t make sense, but I thought I made a very good purchase. I’ve been using a much smaller version of it for years. One of the good features of it is that definitions are arranged in increasing order of archaism, namely, the most up-to-date one comes first.

Writing exercise 6

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After going to a keirin stadium nearby last Sunday, I went over to a pub in Kokubunji that I would frequent about five years ago, but I'd forgotten it closes on Sundays. So I headed to the next town, strolled around the streets for a while in the twilight, and decided to stop in an izakaya (Japanese style pub) I'd never been to before. Luckily enough, I found the place so cozy and comfortable and, on top of that, I had a crush on mama-san there who said she was at the tender age of 57. So while I had no luck with the keirin races, overall I felt pretty fortunate that Sunday.
These days more and more these kinds of small izakaya are going out of business, in part because, from what I've gathered from people running those pubs, younger generations today do not drink as much as older generations used to when young, and in part because heavily-invested chain izakayas are increasingly taking away their share, making every suburban city look pretty much the same, and contributing to the deculturalization of our country, especially in terms of the landscape of suburban cities.

It looks like there's no such English word as 'deculturalization.' I think I wanted to mean by that that things tend to become more bland as we get more 'civilized,' but I don't know for sure myself nor am I particularly willing to Yahoo! or G##gle it. In Japanese, it's possible to create new words by combining Kanji (Chinese) characters in any way you want, thanks to Kanji characters being ideographic. Except that we don't do that very often. At any rate I think it's good to revel in the pleasure of creating new combinations of Kanji characters to create new words or ideas on our own, rather than spending time fooling around with English words and being laughed at by English-speaking people as the world's largest producer of 'Engrish' when it comes to ads. I know I have absolutely no say about being laughed at. But as far as 'Engrish' goes, my point of view is that the English used solely for advertising purposes in Japan only doesn't have to be grammatically correct, or even genuine English words, for that matter. It's something that needs to be construed in the terms of semantics, like 'connotation,' etc.

Houry diary on Equinox

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9:35 am in Tokyo time: It’s a very beautiful day today here in Connecticut. No. I live in Tokyo. It makes me feel like humming “Ribbon in the sky.”

11:10 am in Tokyo time: I’ve been wondering whether to spend today learning Engrish or just go out. My conclusion is that staying at home all day long on a day like this is like wasting every penny on a dark horse you’re pretty sure has no chance of winning. So I decided to go out for a Keirin race today. I’ll take an electronic camera with me.

4:00 pm in Tokyo time: Clouds started to cover up the sky from noon and I ended up not going out. I'm going to study Engrish.

5:00 pm in Tokyo time: The book I'm reading now is "Airframe" by Michael Crichton. His books are generally much easier to read than, say, Stephen King's, and I believe they are appropriate for intermediate learners like me.

6:30 pm in Tokyo time: Speaking of Stephen King, "Pet sematary" is the most chilling, horrendous and creepiest novel I've ever read. I read it in translation. I don't want to read it again, though I'm sometimes tempted to. It really freaked me out.

7:54 pm in Tokyo time: I realize blogging needs some kind of momentum to keep going. Or simply enough time on your hand.

9:32 pm in Japan time: Thanks for reading today. Hope tomorrow will be another great day for you.

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Some of you might have taken the photo below as an obituary to this blog.
But you're wrong.

Recently I have a strange feeling that this blog doesn't belong to me anymore, probably because I've realized that this is being read by much more people than I thought. Sometimes I sense that some people out there are actually reading this while I don't feel like updating at all. And I find something morally wrong with the way I'm doing this, especially considering that I sometimes feel like I have no responsibility whatsoever to what I've written here so far, looking at this as if it's something written by someone else. I seem to be one of the 21st century schizoid men, in the far east. I wonder how many bloggers out there feel the same way I do.

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