Month: April 2025

Dumbing Down of Manual Skills or Just a Lack of Resourcefulness?

The other night about ten translators in various stages of their careers—all of whom, however, are long-term residents here in Japan—got together for eating, drinking, and jaw-wagging at a yakitoriya. As often happens, at what would have been the end of our evening, there was a call to go to yet a second place, and five of us traipsed off to one, a place that could be characterized as an izakaya food court, consisting of eight different drinkeries housed in one large space, with very little demarcation between them. The average age of the clientele at all of them appeared to be no more than one-half—and probably closer to one-third—of our group. We stayed for perhaps less than an hour, and one thing that struck me, but only after I got home, was the chopstick envelopes.

It was of common design used by—and bearing the logos of—all eight places, but that was not the thing that stood out. Rather, it was the need that someone evidently felt to print on the envelope how to fold it into a chopstick rest. Were these instructions necessary?

I have been folding chopstick envelopes into rests for more than a half-century, and started doing that after I saw someone at a neighboring table do around 1967. I thought it was a minor skill and idea that sort of came with the territory when you are in Japan.

One side (at the bottom in the above image) of the envelopes we had, which are probably better described as sheaths, had instructions, adopting the terms yamaori and taniori that are used in origami paper folding, with circled numbers, no less, to indicate the sequence of making the folds. A bit of overkill, I think, but perhaps young’uns here are less in tune with folding things into useful, repurposed shapes.

To be fair, I vaguely recall seeing chopstick envelopes with such instructions in the past, but perhaps you need to go to rather low-end places to see them, as the higher-market places sometimes give you chopstick rests.

To give you some background on why I even took the envelope home, it was not to write this post, but rather because I collect chopstick envelopes. I also collect slide rules (no laughter, please), but I digress.

Bonus trivia: The text above the name Omnibus says “No spilling of sake or tears, and no kvetching about people.” The idiom for complaining about something also uses the verb to spill in Japanese, but that doesn’t work well in English.

Why didn’t Ms. Tanaka attend that meeting?

This question came up in an examination of a Japanese deponent, a middle-manager at a company here. The examining attorney did not know whether Tanaka (not the actual name) was male or female, but they were on the organizational chart of the department holding the subject meeting.

The response was “This was an important meeting, and we don’t normally have female department members attend such meetings.”

The court reporter typed “urge to kill” and quickly took it off the screen. Only the attorneys and the interpreters saw it. The deponent probably wondered why some of us were reacting with smiles to what was for him a straightforward explanation, based on traditional Japanese corporate culture. I suspect the deponent figured it out when he was spoken to by his attorneys at the next break.

Some Thoughts on Content Theft and Unlawful Use

There has been a great amount of discussion recently about AI developers scraping copyrighted material from websites and using it to train AI. Some have said that prohibiting AI from learning from copyrighted material would be a death sentence for AI. One recent kerfuffle was caused by AI being able to convert user-submitted photos to images in the style of the well-known Ghibli anime studio.

One thing that appears to be slipping through a crack, however, is that just about everything uploaded to cyberspace has a copyright that is held by someone. It’s not just famous authors’ works, or images and movies that are commercially produced. It’s just about everything written or created and uploaded into cyberspace. including material that has been uploaded unlawfully.

Yes, in some jurisdictions the content needs to be registered in order to bring civil litigation, but most everything in cyberspace has a copyright holder, including the huge amount of material that has been unlawfully published. And a copyright notice is generally considered sufficient to at least indicate the intent of the rightholder. The actual establishment of copyright does not generally require registration. It comes into being the moment a work is committed to a tangible form, and that includes online content.

People appear to have become accustomed to—and by their silence, permissive of—theft and unlawful publishing of copyrighted material in cyberspace, and in particular on social media platforms. Perhaps this has made the general public more willing to accept or be resigned to the next step in the enterprise of stealing content—scraping of content for AI learning.

As someone who has twice had a considerable amount of my company webpage content stolen and unlawfully published by thieves in China, this is of personal concern to me.

So, what about protecting content from scraping? When I searched around for methods to do that recently, I found some strategies. However, I also found a lot of strategies for defeating those protective strategies. Essentially, there were people telling others how to scrape websites without being detected or blocked.

It could be that the only ultimate solution is not to publish anything in cyberspace that you don’t want stolen and unlawfully used. If you want to learn what someone has written, thinks, or creates, you might ultimately need to ask them for the related content. The proliferation of unlawfully published or otherwise used material looks like it is taking the Internet in a direction not envisioned by its creators.

How exciting: A clueless interpreter broker in the US

Sometime around 2005, I received an inquiry for deposition interpreting from what appeared to be a one-person broker in the US. Although I have almost never worked for brokers, in a moment of weakness (and because she agreed to my high fee) I accepted the assignment. What ensued was a good demonstration of the value that most brokers do not and cannot add to the process of deposition interpreting.

After much effort, with scant case information from the broker (because she had scant information), I was able to discover what case the deposition was for; the broker didn’t know and probably didn’t care. I discovered on my own what law firms were involved and contacted the relevant attorney who would be examining the witness. Surprise; it turned out to be the CEO of an airline here in Japan. An additional surprise was that it was the CEO of an airline involved in a different case with an airline client of mine, although the involvement did not represent a conflict that would preclude me from interpreting for this deposition.

When I told the broker who the deponent was, the reaction was “How exciting!” This is a good demonstration of how brokers for interpreting services can operate without any knowledge of, or interest in obtaining information about the specific cases for which they are brokering interpreting services.

I never heard from that broker again, and that was just fine with me.