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.
I am on the high-functioning curmudgeonism spectrum—high-functoning 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.
It was a lazy Sunday yesterday, and we decided to take a short trip to the Honmoku Fishing Pier, just a few minutes by bus from our place, walkable with a bit of effort, but I didn’t have that bit in me yesterday.
We weren’t going to fish. I haven’t been fishing since I was about 16, and all of my fishing trips were on fishing boats in the Long Island Sound or off the South shore of Long Island with my dad. I have never fished from a pier.
The fishing pier was packed, including couples out on a fishing date, so to speak, and parents with children. We spent about two hours watching people catch fish of various sizes, mostly disappointingly small and probably requiring their release.
While we were relaxing watching other people fish, we got to see a number of largish cargo ships pass to the East from Yokohama. None were close enough to be identified, but technology came to the rescue, in the form of the Vessel Finder website.
This website provides a map with all ships with the required equipment turned on. Ships involved in arms shipments to and fuel shipments from a certain aggressor state apparently switch off that equipment. But I digress.
One of the ships was the Oberon, a vehicle carrier headed to Kobe (as indicated by the Vessel Finder website).
The availability of this information on ships reminds me of the time some years ago when I was left with not much to do on an interpreting assignment in Evansville, Indiana. The witness in a patent case I was supposed to be interpreting for was never called, and I spent a week there with not much to do (during the daytime, anyway) but look out my hotel window at the barges moving slowly up and down the Ohio River, on which the hotel was situated.
I was fully paid for all days, and, while I was cooling my heels in my hotel room waiting for the call that never came, I discovered a service similar to Vessel Finder that indicated the departure times, destinations and arrival times of barges carrying exciting things like coal up and down the Ohio River. Such is the exciting life of a litigation interpreter. But I digress.
