Hello from beautiful San Diego once more. In a few hours I’ll be on my way back to Japan, taking yet another trip across the Pacific. It’s been a great visit home, and I’m ready to go back, heavily laden with taco sauce from Taco Bell and other cool things I can’t get in my adopted country.
America and Japan are quite different from each other — even something as simple as names can be very different. My daughter and I came to the U.S. with Daisuke Furuta, one of our employees from Japan, and Rina enjoyed having one more person to speak Japanese with in the U.S. However, she called me aside to ask me why all the people in America called him by his first name, Daisuke, rather than by his last name with “kun” (the name suffix usually used for boys or men), e.g. Furuta-kun. You’d usually use the last name with -san in formal situations (e.g. Furuta-san), and -kun if the person you were talking to was male, and was fairly well known to you. -chan, the suffix usually used for girls, is used with the first name, e.g. Rina-chan or Kaori-chan. Sometimes the last name only is used to refer to someone, usually among males or schoolmates (Tomo might call Daisuke by his last name only, e.g. “Furuta, come over here”). Using the first name only, e.g. “Daisuke,” is somewhat odd in Japanese, and implies an extremely close relationship, hence my daughter’s confusion about everyone in America calling Daisuke by his first name. Once I called a female student of mine at home and asked her mother if she was home. I accidentally referred to the student by her first name only, and her mother was immediately on her guard, wondering what kind of relationship this gaijin had with her daughter (I was innocent, honest).
When you become bilingual in a language, you learn a lot about how your own brain works, what processes go on when you learn new vocabulary words (every act of learning involves a physical change in your brain, the creation of a new synapse from one cell to another), and so on. It makes you think about the nature of language in general and consider deeply parts of your own native language that you’ve taken for granted all your life — in short, it’s really cool. The act of translation from one language to another is really something, too: it takes place deep inside your brain, on a level below your conscious thoughts, like a process in a computer that’s running in the background. You place some English in the “buffer,” and then something happens in your brain, and in a few seconds Japanese is waiting for you to retrieve it. You can almost hear the “ding” in your mind as the translation “cooks” and is done, without any conscious awareness, at least as far as I’ve experienced.
When it comes to translation, though, there’s one direction to go: from your second language to your native language. If I am translating from Japanese to English, I’ll be able to do it just fine; but woe is me if I try to translate from English to Japanese. I know this because I tried it once. My father, who was a nautical engineer who built advanced hydrofoils, had to get a patent of his translated into Japanese, so he asked his Japanophile son to do it for him. Wanting to impress my Dad, I agreed, and two months of hard labor later had produced what had to be the most hilarious patent translation ever seen in Japan. I learned my lesson and now politely refuse any requests for translations into Japanese. I believe that 90% of the “wasei eigo” (literally “made in Japan English”), e.g. the silly English words the Japanese come up with, are inadvertently created by Japanese asked to translate from Japanese to English — they are doing their best but are basically translating the wrong direction.
The J-List staff in Japan has gotten another great update of products for you. The newly added items include a great deluxe art book for Please Teacher (one of my favorite anime shows), great toys for SD character and Masked Rider fans, a great collection of short films by seven directors including Ryuhei Kitamura, fresh stock of super Shirow Masamune items, Hello Kitty ice cube makers, new gum and candy items, more cool toys only available in Japan, and more! For adult customers, we’ve got many new 18+ products, with great new DVDs (“Heating Double Manko”), a super all-cat girl fetish photobook, more penis teasing fetish, a new Aida Garo breast fetish photobook, .hack hentai manga and other great adult comics from Japan, many newly added and restocked adult DVDs, the new issue of Dela Beppin, and other great products.
The J-List Server Move is coming up in a few days. The new server is going to be great, about ten times the raw power to serve up J-List pages, and several other new features. As always, we expect things to go smoothly, but problems may occur. If you notice any oddness with our site over the next few days, please let us know. Also, if the order system breaks, you can order through the secure email form located at https://jastusa.cybrhost.com/Merchant2/contact.mv? .
