I’ve made the long hop from Japan to New York, and I’m now enjoying the 19 degree (with wind chill) temperatures. We’re here to attend the New York Anime Festival, Dec 7-9, and can be found either at booth #408 or #340, with our great Domo-kun T-shirts, hoodies and hats as well as manga, PC dating-sim games and more. This show is going to be a really excellent one, with thousands of fans of many great companies all coming together, and we hope to see you there! Update: if for no other reason, come for the Domo-kun booth babes!!!!!
Its fun to “surf the culture shock” wave when in a new city, and New York has been a great place for this so far. I’ve stood on freezing subway platforms that look like they came out of a level of the game Max Payne (no relation, by the way), done power-shopping at the multi-story Toys “R” Us in Times Square, and narrowly avoided staying in New York’s worst hotel. It’s been extremely exciting, and we haven’t even gotten started with the convention yet. Everyone knows that New York is an extremely international city, but the Star Wars Cantina-esque variety of cultures and languages around me has really been a surprise. I’ve gotten into a political discussion over delicious pasta with a family from India, debated similar issues with a taxi driver from Pakistan, and gotten into interesting conversations with people from the top of the world (Sweden) and the bottom (Australia). I’m staying in a very Jewish neighborhood, so I’m getting to see what a real Hanukkah celebration is like, too. It struck me that New York must be the perfect opposite of clean, homogenized Japan, where even speaking your a regional dialect of the language is frowned upon, at least in Tokyo.
Transliteration is the act of transcribing from one writing system into another, for example from Japanese to the Roman alphabet, and it’s not an exact science, which is why we have alternate spellings for words and names in other languages, like good old Muamar Gaddaffi/Khadafi/Quadhafi, Mao Tse-Tung/Zedong, or Hanukkah/Chanuka for that matter. There are several aspects of Japanese that make writing Japanese words in English an inherently vague and challenging process. For example, there are long vowels in Japanese that are meaningless when written out in English since they don’t change how foreigners pronounce the words. The correct way to write “pretty girl” in Japanese is “bishoujo” with the extra ‘u’ in the middle, and yet it’s often shortened to “bishojo” for brevity’s sake. Is it better to leave the long vowels in the word, although it complicates pronunciation and makes the words harder to remember, or should they be omitted? There’s no simple answer — although writing long vowel words with the shorter spelling is “wrong,” it’s no worse than the way meanings and pronunciations changed when French melded with English after 1066. Famous place names like Tokyo and Osaka also have long vowels that are cut to avoid making the name needlessly long — since no one wants to write Toukyou and Oosaka. Another area where there is vagueness about how to write Japanese words or names in English is L and R. Actress and Tokyo University graduate Rei Kikukawa’s first name could be transliterated as Lei without it being wrong, so is it okay to do this? There’s often little agreement and so both names might be used sometimes — there’s no “right” way to write it. It can be very confusing, especially to search engines that can’t tell that two similar words are the same.
