Well, my fun trip to Seattle is done, and the time has come for me to flit back to J-List World Headquarters in Northern Kanto, Japan. See everyone on the other side!
One new anime I started watching is Rokudenashi Majutsu Koushi to Akashic Records, aka Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor, a fun anime about two girls named Sistine and Rumia who attend a school for magic. One day their favorite teacher is replaced by a lazy good-for-nothing named Glenn Radars who seems to know no proper magic and can’t even get to class on time, causing the girls to get angry, but also to think deeply on the nature of magic and their world. It’s a fun show with a high budget, excellent voice acting and a well-developed story, coming as it does from an established series of light novels. Although it starts out as an anime version of the second Harry Potter film complete with Professor Gilderoy Lockhart (plus some fan service), it’s really a fun show you should check out!
Back in the early days of my interest in Japan, I used to wonder how computers and word processors might work in the language, with its convoluted system of hiragana and katakana (syllable-based writing systems used for expressing Japanese and foreign words) and hundreds of kanji kanji (pictographs that communicate complex meaning). I imagined keyboards with hundreds of keys on them to make input possible, but the reality is much simpler: modern OSes (both on computers and smartphones) use front-end processing programs to take text you’ve entered using the normal QWERTY keyboard layout and convert it to the proper characters when you hit the space bar. There are certain fundamental issues that come up when entering Japanese text into a computing device, though. First, there’s the danger of 変換ミス henkan-miss or having the OS guess the wrong kanji, like when it chooses 性交 (seikou, to have sexual intercourse) when you intended to write 成功 (seikou, to succeed at something) or 精工 (seikou, meaning “exquisite and detailed workmanship,” the kanji of the Seiko watch company). Another problem is 文字化け mojibake, literally “characters turning into monsters on your screen,” which can happen if your web browser can’t figure out the correct character conversion to use for displaying text. (Japanese people take it for granted that American companies like Microsoft and Apple will get kanji fonts wrong more often than Japanese companies.) Since Japanese net users are the laziest in the world, and love to create weird slang words like うp (“up,” short for “I uploaded that”) or おk (a slacker way to write “ok”). Finally, there’s the problem girls with huge oppai experience when they try to type on a keyboard…
J-List stocks great artbooks from Japan, with several added to the site every day. We’ve got everything from the works of top artists like Kantoku to brand new works like Harikamo “girl in the tree” Illustrations or Miki Yoshikawa Illustrations 2006-2017. All artbooks are shipped to you wrapped with loving care by our staff, so they’ll arrive in perfect shape at your home. Why not browse our artbooks now?
