Shrapnel Removed from a Word Warrior

30 Years ago and 7 years ago

It is March 20 in Japan and today we mark not only the Vernal Equinox, but also the 30th anniversary of the sarin gas mass murders committed in the subway in Tokyo by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1995. The media is alive with coverage looking back on that domestic terrorism and looking at the present of some of the survivors.

It was a high-profile incident and a long, high-profile trial, leading to the criminals being executed 23 years later, in 2018 at the Tokyo Detention House, something I was told about just a few months later as I started what would be a 35-consecutive-day interpreting assignment at that same facility, in a case that was also certainly also high profile and in the news for months, but that did not involve mass murders, or any violence, for that matter.

The successor of the Aum Shinrikyo, Aleph, is still apparently operating as a cult, collecting “believers” and their money, and is still considered a dangerous group.

That said, Japan has not been very good at neutralizing such cults. Perhaps it’s because some of them lay claim to being religions and Japan has a rather dark history of being nasty to religions that it doesn’t like. It has had a dificult time bringing The Unification Church to justice, and that group is still open for business under a different name, but with the same goals of sucking up money from victims.

Sorry, my business card is only in Japanese.

One day long ago, when I was the President of the Japan Association of Translators, I attended an event held by the Japan Translation Federation, a group that is for all intents and purposes operated by translation agencies in Japan.

It was mostly a socializing event. The JTF is under the aegis of a Japanese governmental ministry and I was introduced as the head of JAT to a person from that ministry. We exchanged business cards, the side of the mine shown to this person being in Japanese and indicating clearly my position in JAT—a group of translators, rather than translation agencies—and my profession as a translator.

His reaction—after receiving and looking at my business card—was to hand me his card, saying “Please excuse me, my card is only in Japanese.”

This guy was just told I was the head of a translators’ organization in Japan, I was speaking Japanese, and handed him a business card that said the same about me.

At first, I thought to make a quip about this stupidity, then discarded the idea, but ultimately did tell him that “When you are a Japanese-to-English translator, reading Japanese is part of the job. I suspect he didn’t catch the sarcasm.

I wonder whether things have changed much. Many Japanese have been conditioned by trained-bear foreigners on TV here speaking Japanese of a variety, some quite well, but a foreigner translating or even reading Japanese could still be an oddity to some Japanese. Some surely some cling to the belief that Japan and the language spoken by Japanese is so unique it cannot be mastered without having Japanese DNA. Bless their hearts.

How old were you during the war?

I interpreted in a deposition of the senior executive of a major Japanese corporation in connection with patent litigation in the US. Things were going well, until one question from the examining attorney near the end of the allotted time for the deposition.

The question came just after the attorney went back at the end of the deposition to ask about the educational background of the deponent, something that is normally done at the beginning of a deposition. In part of his reply, the Japanese executive indicated that he attended the Army Cadet School just before WW2. This prompted the attorney to ask “So how old were you during the war?”

This was to be a jury trial in a state that is not known for being generous with non-Americans. The attorney was fully aware of that, and I can only imagine that it would be seen as advantageous for the jury to think that the deponent had—or at least was old enough to have had—participated in WW2.

Naturally, the attorney on the defending side justifiably went berserk. Such a question had no bearing on the merits of the case. Getting to watch this kind of provocation and the reactions thereto unfold is arguably a benefit to deposition interpreters. Mostly, though, it is mind-numbingly boring, particularly if the subject matter is something the interpreter is not interested in.