Tsukuba Express emergency exit sign

Reading this sign, I was struck by the disporportionate amount of Japanese relative to English.

So, what does the sign say?

The English is straightforward: “Emergency use only / By pulling the handle the door can be opened manually.”

The Japanese however is much more extensive: “非常用ドアコック・非常の場合はこの中のハンドルを手前に引けばドアは手であけられます。みだりに車外へ出ると危険です。もし出るときはほかの電車やおりる場所にもご注意下さい。なお係員の指示があった場合にはそれに従って下さい。”

One difference is the Japanese word for this particular device, ドアコック, which unfortunately is not transliterated into English, Door Cock. Perhaps this is a valid technical term, but I’m guessing that they just didn’t want the English speakers snickering too much during an emergency exit.

The rest of the Japanese text offers more specific guidance than the English: “Emergency Door Cock / In the case of an emergency, if the handle contained herein is pulled inward, the door can be opened manually. Exiting the train unnecessarily is dangerous. When exiting, please be careful of other trains and the location where you exit. Also, if an official gives instructions, please follow them.”

Of course, this is all just cover-your-ass safety jargon. During an emergency, no one will say, “Okay guys, let’s just do what the tiny sign says and we’ll all be fine!” So, not translating the full details seems reasonable.

Or maybe this is part of a sinister plot, and the Tsukaba Express’s company wants people who can’t read Japanese to be able open the door without having full knowledge of the safety protocol; then, the poor illiterates can get run down by another train after exiting!

Or maybe they put the Japanese into Google Translate, saw the results, and said, “Fuck it, there’s plenty of English.”

Google version: An emergency door cock by pulling the emergency door handle in front to be opened by hand in this. It is dangerous to go outside a car without good reason. Please note that if you go to other places by train or Oriru. In the case of staff, please follow the instructions on it.

Yesterday was crazy busy at work. I don’t fully understand the seasonal ups and downs of the scientific editing business, but right now, we are swamped. I really need to speed up my editing, but of course the trick is to do that while maintaining accuracy.

Yesterday, I worked from 9:30 am to 9:30 pm, bookended by an hour on the train each way — on thanksgiving. Lucky me (but Monday was a holiday, so I can’t complain too much).

It’s little late, but I wonder if there is somewhere in this country where I can score some pumpkin pie?

Today was my first day at Small Scientific Editing Company.

It went pretty well, though it was super busy. I spent most of the day working on a math paper, which was fairly rough going since I’m not great at math. Lots of the terms and stuff were things about which I had a vague recollection, so I understood the gist of the paper, but at the same time, I don’t have a working knowledge of the math or a grasp of the details. So I corrected the English and battled with the technical jargon as best I could.

Then in the afternoon, I did a physical chemistry paper. I’m also not great at Pchem, but after doing math, it was a welcome relief. And I guess it wasn’t a hardcore physical chemistry paper — it was more material science, which I can do fairly well. The main problem was that I was really rushed to finished the paper, so I just did one pass through, so I probabably missed some stuff. But someone else will read it before it gets sent out, so hopefully they will tidy it up a bit more. I ended up working until 8pm. Fortunately, my company isn’t a typical Japanese company that demands unpaid and pointless overtime as an expected part of the job. We only have to work overtime if we actually have stuff to do, and we get paid for it.

Doing the freelance work, I found that each pass through the paper yields diminishing returns. A 20 page paper might take about 4 hours to do a first edit during which I’d catch about 95% of the mistakes. A second close reading might take 40 minutes to get another 4%. Then a third reading, is basically reading normal speed and correcting the last 1%, which is (hopefully) just nitpicking small bits of style as opposed to grammar or spelling errors.

I’ll greatly improve my efficiency if I can up the percentage of errors I catch on the first pass to say 97 or 98%. Then I could do one more quick pass and be done, and not have to worry that I am leaving tons of mistakes for the final proof by one of the senior editors (which should be really quick).

Today was also my first day dealing with the commute to Tokyo. The trains are pretty crowded, but I think if I get to the station at a good time, I’ll be able to sit on the TX. After that, I take the Hibiya line, on which I am probably going to have to get used to standing since it always seems to be crowded.

Uniglo, a Japanese clothing store, has this strange clock up on their website. Pretty girls doing odd dancing in somewhat stylish and affordable clothes with a handy clock. What’s not to like?

Masses of pollen wafting from a forest of Japanese cedar trees. (Photo credit: The Yomiuri Shimbun)

My seasonal allergies, the dreaded 花粉症　(kafunshou), have started up. My nose isn’t running too much, but my nose and eyes are super itchy, and I may just claw my eyes out. I never had allergies in America; I wonder if I’ve just developed allergies as I’ve gotten older, or if I’m only allergic to the Japanese cedar tree.

In other news, I only have 7 more days of school, and only 8 more classes! Today, I’m gonna play a game sort of like Scattegories with my 4th graders, so hopefully that will be fun and easy.

Also, I finished Far Cry 2 last night. The story picked up toward the end and became a little more interesting, but the game took way too long to move the story along. All and all it was a fun game. Now that I’m done with the story mode, I’ll try out the multiplayer mode, and try to pwn some n00bs!

My favorite (well…actually least favorite…) examples of wasteful construction in Japan are tetrapods, the eye sores that line every beach in Japan.  Supposedly they prevent erosion, but I’m not sure if that’s true or not.

Japan has many chronically underfunded needs and problems.  For example, their is not enough affordable day care for working mothers.  This is one of serveral reasons why Japan has such a low birth rate, and as a result, women are choosing to have fewer children and having them later in life.  If Japan spent more money on day care,  it would provide direct economic stimulus by employing  more people in the child-care industry while providing further benefits from the  increased productivity of women in the workforce and helping to ease Japan’s demographic problems.

Unfortunately, Japan’s unelected, unaccountable, and very powerful bureaucrats, along with their political benefactors decided to throw money at a $250 million dollar airports that now has two flights a day and bridges that no one uses.

Of course, maybe it isn’t so bad if elderly people are swiping food and medicine…it’s probably much more efficient than raising taxes and having a government program that gives them out!  (The libertarian in me is raging, with all the bailouts and incompetence these days.)  But it is interesting how people react:

Despite the arrest numbers, prosecutions of the elderly in a culture that holds them in high regard are rare. Stores often don’t even report the crime to police, according to security experts.

The 80-year-old man who stole the stomach medicine was eventually led to his bicycle by store security. The security officer helped the man with his groceries and bowed in respect, hoping the elderly man had learned his lesson and would return as a good customer.

I have a feeling that in America they would get thrown in the slammer,or at least have the cop take them to the station or interview them before letting them go.  And at the end I doubt there would be bowing (or American-equivalent of showing repect).

I first came to Japan a little more than 3 years ago. When I arrived, I knew next to no Japanese. My knowledge was limited to a few greetings and a vague familiarity with the two phonetic scripts, hiragana and katakana. Now I am approximately at the level of the JLPT 2kyuu. I took the test earlier this month and either barely passed or barely failed, but however the test turns out, my level is in the ballpark.

When I started studying Japanese, I didn’t really know how to study. Looking back now, I think my first two years here were a wasted opportunity. My studying was inefficient and largely ineffective, so this first post isn’t a place to look for good advice, but rather a cautionary tale of what not to do.

One of the first mistakes I made was to buy the romaji version of the textbook Minna no Nihongo. One of the teachers at the free Japanese class in town recommended it because I could barely read the hiragana version. However, as anyone who seriously studies Japanese will tell you, romaji is nothing but a hindrance to learning Japanese. It took me only a week to realize I had bought a totally useless book. Although I wasted 2000 yen, I learned a good lesson — you just have to tough it out with real Japanese. Hiragana will take care of itself. For most people, katakana takes a while longer since the script appears relatively infrequently, but that too will come in time.

Which brings me to the next obstacle in learning Japanese — kanji. Once I got my hands on a proper version of Minna no Nihongo, I began the exercise in frustration that is learning kanji.

Simple kanji can be learned easily enough.

口　mouth (Hey it looks like a mouth!)

山　mountain (Hey, it looks like a mountain!)

However, one very quickly bumps up against two major problems: 1) Simple kanji with multiple readings. 2) Basic words with difficult kanji.

The first point can be illustrated by the character 下 which has a general meaning of “down”. If you were learning English, the word would take very little time and effort — only 4 letters. fairly easy pronunciation, and a simple meaning. In Japanese, 下 confronts you with a multitude of readings: した　げ　さがる　しも　さげる, among others. Now, I think this is all very basic, but at the time it was overwhelming. Almost every character, no matter how simple, seemed to come with with a multitude of readings. For example, consider “up, down, left, right” 上・下・左・右, words a beginning student would surely want to learn. I can think of 15 readings for these characters off the top of my head うえ・じょう・かみ・あげる・あがる・のぼる・した・しも・さがる・さげる・おりる・みぎ・ゆう・ひだり・さ. For a beginning student, I think it is very difficult to sort through all this to figure out what is important.

A second problem is that simple concepts often have difficult kanji. The first chapter of Minna no Nihongo teaches “How old are you?” 何歳ですか. It is easy to learn how to say it なんさいですか/nan sai desu ka, but the character 歳　is pretty daunting for a first chapter also covering such topics as “This is a pen” and “The dog is brown”. I can’t count how many times I wrote 歳 trying to remember it. Eventually, I got to where I could recognize the character, but I could never remember how to write it for very long. That modest progress for only one character came as the result of an unreasonably large amount of effort.

Starting out, different aspects of Japanese — reading, writing, speaking, listening — competed for my time and attention. If I focused exclusively on speaking, I’d remain unable to read anything, even if I made progress with vocabulary and grammar. So I ended up working on reading and writing as well, but that slowed my acquisition of new language to a crawl.

So, overall, it was a pretty rough start.

So watch tonight I’m on TV here again in Kofu for getting free potatoes. I love this country.