Month: March 2025

The Duty English Speaker

Back around 1978, I had an appointment to see a fellow at a facility of Cannon just on the Tokyo side of the Tamagawa. Never wanting to make people wait, and more particularly wanting to leave enough time to find this facility that I was visiting for the first time, I left the office of the US company I was so early that I arrived far ahead of my appointment time. I resigned myself to cooling my heels for a while in the waiting area normally located just outside the receptionist desk.

These days, receptionist desks here are sometimes provided with telephones and a list of numbers to call. At the time, a carbon-based receptionist was standard.

I announced myself, handing over my Japanese business card and, apologizing for being so early, said that I would be fine waiting, no need to rush the person I was to meet with.

I related this to the receptionist in perfectively fine sales-ready Japanese. Her response was “Just a moment” in somewhat strange English, and she hurriedly called someone on the phone. I was hoping it was not the person I was to meet, because he might have felt obligated to drop what he was doing and come out to greet me. That fear was unwarranted, but what transpired was a bit odd.

The receptionist was calling an English-speaking person to rescue her from her problem with this foreigner in the lobby. Emergency, emergency, foreigner in lobby; this is not a drill!

I was sat down in the lobby and told (again, in strange English) that someone would be there shortly.

The person who arrived was not the person with whom I had an appointment, but rather someone you could call the duty hapless English speaker, who probably gets called in for such emergency situations.

When this fellow sat down with me, it was apparent to both of us what had gone wrong. We laughed and chatted for a while, after which he assured me that he would let the fellow I was there to see know that I had arrived but could wait.

This kind of thing is not so common nowadays, but there is still the expectation on the part of some people in Japan that when you see a foreigner’s lips moving, what is happening is English speech, and you need to react accordingly.

Discount for Handwritten Delivery: Japan’s lingering love affair with low-tech methods

Back in mid-1980s, I was contacted by a manufacturer here in Japan to translate a product manual from Japanese to English.

I quoted the job as a total amount on the basis of the volume I could see from the source text I had been given. The client replied, asking me if there was some way I could lower the fee. He asked if I would be willing to grant a discount if he would accept a handwritten translation. I needed to tell him—and so I did tell him—that there would be an extra charge if he wanted a handwritten translation.

People who are surprised at this need to think of the cultural and technological context. At the time, Japan was just getting to where it could produce printed matter without using a complex mechanical Japanese typewriter. Traditionally, the typewriter, and even the much simpler typewriter for production of English documents, was seen as a foreign element in the business environment, a hurdle to get over and more troublesome than just handwriting things. The lingering popularity of the fax machine is in some sense a testament to the lingering popularity of handwritten things and the view of keyboarding something as troublesome.

The client ultimately agreed to a “normal” translation, produced neatly as an output from my computer.

A Change is Coming

Having realized:

(1) that freelance translators reliant on agencies are seeing things collapse and translation work from agencies morph into mostly very low-paid post-editing of AI output, and

(2) that I cannot empower or teach agency-dependent freelance translators to break out of and survive the above situation,

This evening (March 28, 2025) JST, I deleted all of the posts in this blog that were in the category Business for Translators, and these posts will not be restored. Further efforts in this area are futile. It’s ending for most, and there is nothing I can do about it.

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.

The Gathering Storm

Authoritarian countries (dictatorships, elected or not) in which political opponents can be declared foreign agents, jailed on false charges, and murdered, are supported by Trump, Musk, Vance, and Witkoff.

Can people see where this is going? Do the deer-in-the-headlights Democrats see where this is going? Are they willing to act? Is it too late and have people given up?

The gathering storm, folks, the gathering storm.

And if China attacks and annexes Taiwan (which could happen when the war in Europe worsens or when there is horrific domestic turmoil in the US, two distinct possibilities that might intersect, but either could be sufficient encouragement to China), my guess is that Trump will not act. Perhaps he will…drum roll…posture about or enact yet additional tariffs “on China,” which are actually paid by US importers of products from China and passed on to US consumers who have no purchase options. Trump never explains that part of tariffs.

Meanwhile, the US and countless Western democracies are reliant on manufacturing in China. Allowing that to happen was a tragic strategic error.

The US better hope that TSMC can escape from Taiwan, avoiding extreme export restrictions or even nationalization. They’ve already started their escape, and I wish them and the free democratic world well in their efforts to survive this shitstorm.

I would not be at all surprised if Trump has already been assured of asylum in Russia in the event that things get so serious in the US that even his minions on the Supreme Court cannot rescue him.

One major issue in the United States is whether the military will remain under Trump’s control, and whether they will be willing to point their guns at American citizens. This is usually a concern only in Third-World countries, but that is where Trump is leading the US.

The above is not hyperbole, and this is not a drill.