Author: William Lise

Long-term (49-plus years) resident of Japan. Former electrical engineer and have been translating and interpreting for over four decades.

I gave at the office, thank you.

Years ago, returning from a yakitoriya I frequented in Shimbashi, I was in the toilet at the JR station, and the guy at the next urinal made what he thought was a complimentary remark about me—or, more precisely, part of me. He must have had bad eyesight. When I ignored him, he continued. When I told him 間に合っている (essentially, “I gave at the office”), he became annoyed, working himself gradually into a mild rage, and ultimately said that we should go to the police box, a move he would soon regret. It was like music to my ears. Here a guy essentially propositions me in the toilet and he wants to take me to the police. Fine, I said. And off we went to the Karasumoriguchi police box (which I believe subsequently morphed into a small soba or ramen shop).

When we got there, the police officer asked us what was up. After I told my story (just as noted above), the fellow prefaced his story with 外人は皆変態だろう？ (All foreigners are pervs, right?). The cop’s reaction was “お前が求めている外人はそうだろうが、この方は整然としているよ” (I imagine the foreigners you’re looking for are, but this guy seems on the up and up.)

I could have kissed the cop but, having gotten him on my side, and considering the nature of this incident, that would probably have been counterproductive to say the least. Then the officer turned to me and said essentially “What shall we do with this guy?”

I need to note that the guy’s business card was sitting right in front of me on the table in the police box. His name and title were clearly visible. He was a mid-level manager at a Japanese company that has many gasoline stations all over Japan. He was on a business trip to Tokyo.

Knowing his vulnerable situation, I simply said that it would probably be best to let the legal system take care of this. The guy surely imagined his career going up in smoke. I can just imagine the excuse he would need to make to explain away a trip to Tokyo for a court appearance, and such cases can involve more than one court appearance. If this happened today, one option would be to out him up the yin-yang on social media. Hang on, he might have actually liked that, especially the getting stuck up his ying with a yang.

He apologized profusely, I agreed not to bring charges, and we left the police box. See what a nice guy I am? Actually, I had no desire to go to court to accuse this lout.

This happened some time in 1984.

時は昭和59年のころであった、ピシッ !!

CEO Spoofing Scams

There have been increasing numbers of reports recently of CEO spoofing (なりすまし) of internal company emails that are actually from criminals looking to have the recipient send money somewhere.

A common scenario is one in which the president or some other senior executive asks an employee to send money, usually not revealing that action to other employees. The email will be fashioned to look authentic.

It now looks like I have received a similar email, spoofing me—it was a terrible job, however—as the sender sent to an alias email address I (the CEO) use only for receiving inquiries.

The immediate giveaway was that it was signed in a way I never sign my emails, but rather the way my name is written only on my physical business cards.

It asks me to start a group on LINE (an immediate “thug tell”) and tells me that there is “no need” for me to invite other people. It’s understandable that they don’t want me to invite other people, since they know that would alert others who could alert me to the scam.

I am instructed in the email to send the QR code of the group to the criminal and they will take it from there. Right.

The most disturbing thing about this is not that it is an email from a criminal—millions of emails from criminals are sent all the time—but that it clearly used a written form of my name in the signature that you can only learn by receiving my business card.

This criminally intended email was addressed to an email address that is not associated with a targeted employee, but that had been exposed in automatically harvestable form on a government website for quite some time. I removed the address from that site long ago, but it is surely in the database of cyberthugs and making the rounds, based on the spam that is collected in my spam folder on my server.

The lesson I see from this is that at least one of the persons to whom I have given my physical business card, probably recently, is a criminal. I don’t give my business card out lightly, however.

I can just imagine what happens to the many people who plaster their email addresses all over cyberspace, a very reckless strategy.

Lesson learned. I need to be more careful with even my physical business card.

My suggestions for the increased security risks these days are:

(1) Never put an email address you use for daily business emails anywhere online in a form that can be automatically harvested by criminals. Posting it as a graphic is one option, but even those graphics can be decoded by criminals.

(2) If there is a danger of some other entity putting your email address online (and advantage sometimes, of course), use only an alias email address to avoid disclosing the associated “real” email address that you normally look at and send from.

This enables you to tell where people got your email address. and that is made even easier by creating numerous purpose-specific aliases.

Never disclose an email address online that you can send from as an inquiry address, as your inadvertently sending from it can compromise it by verifying it for criminals.

(3) If possible, print your name on your business cards in a form that is slightly different from what you normally use in daily business emails.

(4) Beware of handing your business card to reception desks at trade shows and to hotel front desks. I slightly suspect that the criminal email I received was because of handing my business card over to a tradeshow receptionist. The organizations that run those trade shows for manufacturers here in Japan are not necessarily looking out for the security of the visitors to the trade shows they run for their clients. I am considering changing the email address to a new alias address on my business cards every time I order 100 or so.

Additionally, although it’s a different problem entirely, I once gave my business card to a hotel and was soon deluged by spam from the hotel group, the spam being sent from some someplace in Southeast Asia, and it took forever to get myself off the list.

The above suggestions about email aliases might not be easy unless you have registered your own domain, but with use of things like Gmail being quite unprofessional and the increasing need to interact with direct clients as a survival strategy, professional translators aiming at surviving would gain an advantage by not using free email for business.

AI Bubble Bursting? It Doesn’t Matter for translators.

Predictions that AI is a bubble that will shortly burst are becoming more common. These predictions appear to be not from investors, but rather mostly from people who stand to lose if AI succeeds.

The bubble for AI investors might indeed burst someday, but it is clear that AI has already succeeded in significantly reducing the need for translation brokers to purchase translations from professional translators, and the brokers are replacing professionals by using AI to create translations in-house, and then have them post-edited, mostly by former translators with no options. The result has been that many professionals have been left with little translation work, have been reduced to doing low-paid post-editing, or have simply left translation as a way of making a living. These outcomes are a measure of AI’s success.

Professional translators, rather than anticipating with joy the bursting of the AI bubble, should think about current ways to survive in their chosen field of endeavor, in which the work sources (translation-brokering agencies) for the majority of freelancers are already rapidly replacing professional translators with AI systems they use themselves.

Neither freelance translators nor their organizations are giving sufficient attention and thought to this situation. Their focus appears to be on pointing out the failings of AI or claiming without evidence that everything will be fine if translators just “adapt” to the new technology. It looks like translation organizations are not able to bring the hard realities to their members. It is clear that things will not be fine and, in fact, it is clear that the model of freelancers getting translation work from agencies has already largely crumbled. But those organizations are struggling to maintain the appearance of relevance as their member are losing actual relevance.

The boiling frogs need to hop out of the AI pot before it is too late.