Category: Brain Drippings

Random ramblings and thoughts

Some Quite Unrelated Things I Have Learned Recently

  • 茱萸沢 is read Gumizawa. It’s a place in Gotemba that I encountered in an interpreting assignment this past week.
  • Drexel University in Philadelphia can find the diploma of a person who graduated more than a half-century ago, didn’t have a record of his student number (why would he?), and just told them his name, date of birth, approximate graduation date, and major. They found it, and the diploma—I don’t need something in a frame, but putting it in a frame is probably how they justify charging USD 150)—is arriving next week in a package that UPS said is 2 lbs, according to the notification I received today.

Things I learned last month:

  • I am not a bastard (at least in one sense of the word), attested to by the marriage certificate of my long-departed parents obtained from my hometown.
  • The purported Japanese name of Defense Language Institute in Monterey (at least as purported on a Japanese-language Wikipedia page about that school) is アメリカ国防総省語学学校. Why the Japanese turn language into linguistics is beyond me. I guess it sounds more impressive. I don’t recall learning any “linguistics” there in the 1960s, but rather the language spoken in the country that was forced to change its name but not much else a few decades after I graduated.

The classroom time at DLI was more than 1500 hours. That’s equivalent to numerous years in a university language program. Although I had extremely good grades, I managed to lose almost all my speaking ability in that language quite quickly, but that is totally unrelated to the translation and interpreting services I currently provide.

Thoughts on Work in Recent Years

Thinking back on my last few years of translation and interpreting work, I recall that I turned 73 during my largest-ever single interpreting assignment, and I turned 78 during my largest-ever single translation job. These assignments happened seven and two years ago, respectively.

The former was 35 consecutive calendar days of interpreting in a detention facility for a Japanese government agency in a high-profile case involving foreign executives of a company here, and the latter was 1200-plus pages of translation for a US military legal group in a distinctly low-profile case involving a US military person. Crime pays.

I’m not actively chasing new clients these days, but when one chases me, I give some thought to allowing them to catch me.

Things I can do without ♫ In Kvetchalot ♫

I am on the high-functioning curmudgeonism spectrum—high-functioning so that people don’t think I’m dysfunctional, and spectrum, so that I benefit from the trendy “spectral advantage.”

I have problems with numerous things. I would have “issues” with them, but I just cannot purge the word problem from my active vocabulary. Such is the cross that must be borne by a person who arrived just about a month before the baby-boomers.

Problems I kvetch about form a list that grows, shrinks, and changes to suit what pisses me off on any particular day. Some of the items remain unchanged, however. Here are some current annoyances, some frequent annoyers and a few targets of annoying opportunity.

  • Foreigners in Japan who know almost nothing about the country, the culture, and language, but who stay here for years, endlessly complaining about Japan
  • Foreigners in Japan who know almost nothing about the country, the culture, and the language, yet are hopelessly and senselessly in love with Japan and everything Japanese and cannot bring themselves to see that, like all countries, some things are awry in Japan too. There is a significant overlap between these people and those who can’t name any Japanese food other than sushi.
  • Foreigners who think that Japanese eat sushi all the time.
  • Foreigners who believe that veganism is common in Japan and that everybody here is a devout Buddhist. Perhaps that’s true in the atypical places they hang out, or what the view of Japan is where they live.
  • Social media companies such as Meta, which use information donated to them by their willing victims to make money by helping their criminal clients.
  • People sending spam selling fake goods from China.
  • Spam selling fake goods from China.
  • Fake goods from China.
  • China.
  • Japanese ketchup bottles designed so that, when squeezed, they remain in the squeezed shape unless they are carefully coaxed back to their designed shape. Definitely a candidate for the Japanese government’s Bad Design award.
  • Public toilets in Japan with neither paper towels nor hot-air hand driers. If you expect people to wash their hands after pissing or shitting, please provide means for them to dry their hands. My response is not to wash my hands in such places; no apology is needed.
  • Train station platforms in Japan with no trash bins decades after the Aum Shinrikyo sarin-gas domestic terrorism that prompted railroads to take them away, for fear that they would serve as drop points for poison-gas bombs. Many people have long-since forgotten why they can’t find these receptacles.
  • People getting so drunk in Japan that they need to chuck their noodles in public. To be fair, this has become quite rare, but one is still occasionally treated in the morning to sidewalk “flower displays” of last night’s noodles.
  • Japanese broadcast media that avoid mentioning cigarette smoking in the same breath (or in the same news story) with cancer or other specific ailments. This is probably either because they are NHK, certainly influenced by the Japanese government, which is the leading shareholder of Japan’s only tobacco company, Japan Tobacco, or because they are private broadcasters making money from JT’s “health-washing” corporate identity advertising.