For some reason, the accepted translation for this term seems to have become "recycling oriented society" (it's the only one listed in the venerable Green Goddess).

The problem is that you almost never see this term used in genuine English documents. Since it doesn't seem very likely that this concept is unique to (or even originates in) Japan, I'm always on the lookout for a better way to express it.

So far, the best English equivalent I've found is "closed loop economy" ("economy" often serves when the Japanese talks about "society"). Unfortunately, clients often aren't adventurous enough to stray from the anointed dictionary translation, so I tend to keep a little collection of links that support my use "non-dictionary" translations.

Here's a comic where I spotted "closing the loop" being used in much the same way as Japanese uses 循環型社会:

We must "close the loop" and make all products
recyclable, reusable, or compostable

After the time is up, it creates a mecha-robot for you. The more you got right, the cooler your robo.

Here it is:
BetterTechEnglish.com

My goal for the site is to give pointers on technical-English writing to Japanese native speakers, while creating a presence that will help me attract Japanese clients.

It feels kind of odd to write about good English writing in lousy Japanese, but maybe it will serve as a warning about the difficulties of writing in a foreign language.

As PC ownership increased, however, demand for dedicated word processors waned. Toshiba, the first company to make a Japanese-language dedicated word processor, ended support of its last model in 2006.

Excerpt from the article (translated by me):

Toshiba has announced that it will end support of its Rupo series of stand-alone word processors at the end of March [2006]. In September 1978, Toshiba became the world's first manufacturer to release a Japanese-capable word processor, the JW-10. This announcement marks the end of a three-decade word processor business.

The waapuro occupied a window of time similar to that of the electronic typewriter in the English-speaking world, slightly longer due to the slower uptake of PCs in Japan and the unsuitability of mechanical typewriters for the Japanese language.

Stand-alone electronic dictionaries are now going through the same decline. As smart phones and netbooks become more capable, dedicated devices like electronic dictionaries aren't cost effective, and they take up too much space as well.

When you can buy a netbook for the retail price of an electronic dictionary, the choice seems pretty much a no-brainer to me. True, electronic dictionaries come with a nice collection of dictionaries that you'd have to pay for otherwise, but those dictionaries are locked to your device: buy a new device, and you've got to buy your dictionaries all over again.

In terms of cost of ownership, it's a better deal to buy the CD versions of the dictionaries you need, and keep them as you migrate devices. Most of these dictionaries are available online now anyway, many of them for free. I personally subscribe to the Kenkyusha Online Dictionary service, which includes a vast selection of top-notch J-J and J<->E dictionaries.

This electronic dictionary from Sharp includes an impressive array of dictionaries. But priced at ¥36,750 (about US $393 at today's exchange rate), it's about what you'd pay for a netbook. Sharp must be having trouble getting this thing off the shelves, because the same product is available at Amazon Japan for just ¥7,830 (about US $83).

Even at this price, though, these devices don't hold a lot of attraction for me. I got my son a netbook (a Dell Mini 10) for his birthday, and I've been eying it jealously ever since. It seems much more attractive to have a device that can do everything that an electronic dictionary can do, as well as everything else that a real computer can do.

This is especially true now, when most translators I know rely far more on Google than dictionaries.

I predict that the portable electronic dictionary is going to go the way of the stand-alone "waapuro" within a couple of years.

Photo of Kusaya from Wikipedia

Kusaya (くさや) is a Japanese dish of fermented fish. The taste isn't too bad, but the smell is truly overpowering.

A work acquaintance of mine is from an area where kusaya is a delicacy, and wanted me to try some. So when she and her husband visited us in Okinawa, they brought a bottle of it with them.

Being generally game for anything and not too bright, I tried one. Holding my breath, I picked one up, popped it into my mouth, and ate it. It actually didn't taste too bad. On my colleague's advice I washed my hands thoroughly, and we went out to dinner.

Then about an hour later, having totally forgotten about the kusaya, I went to scratch my nose with the fingers that had touched the fish — and the smell was so bad, I nearly threw up from an intense flash of nausea. I think it was the fact that I wasn't expecting to smell anything so foul was what got me. The smell of kusaya is no joke!

After that, even opening the jar of kusaya made me sick to my stomach, and since my wife (wisely) wanted no part of it, I had to throw the thing out. Poor little fishies gave up their lives just to prove a point — some things really are too foul to eat — and to raise a question: who was it who first let their fish rot to this state, and thought that eating it would be a good idea?

Selecting the kanji for koutei in the IME

IME lets you choose between various "input methods": direct input (normal keyboard typing), hiragana (which can be converted to kanji as needed), katakana, and so on. With the exception of direct input, you have to enter characters and then accept your input after performing various conversions on it. For example, to enter kanji characters (which are far too numerous to correspond to single keys on a keyboard), you enter how the kanji is pronounced, and then select the correct kanji for that pronunciation (of which there may be many).

The most useless input method has got to be "half-width alphanumeric." Under this input method, what you type at the keyboard is entered just like with direct input, except you've got to "accept" every string you type.

I can't see any reason why someone would want to use this input method. If you want to enter half-width alphanumeric characters, you would go to direct input and type them normally. It seems to me that the software designers only added this feature because they could, not because there was any use for it.

Half-width alphanumeric input in Notepad

The problem is, on my Japanese keyboard, there's a key to switch the input method right next to the (shorter) space bar. It's thus really easy to hit this key by accident, and switch the input method. And what is the method it switches to? Half-width alphanumeric. Arrg!

This scheme also has a more insidious impact on Japanese to English translators. Since Japanese has no distinction of upper and lower-case letters, clever IME developers have figured out that if you type an upper-case letter while in Japanese input mode, you want a Roman alphabet letter. Japanese writers have therefore learned that if they want to quickly insert an English word into their Japanese, they should capitalize it. Some have become so used to seeing English words capitalized in this way, they'll insist that the words stay capitalized in your English translation (that you must use the same English words that they chose is a foregone conclusion). Double arrg! And a curse on IME developers everywhere.

If you were born before 1945 or after 1989, you get 20,000 yen; otherwise you get 12,000 yen. My family is getting 64,000 yen (currently equivalent to about US $675).

My wife told me she plans to stick the whole thing in the bank. Which just goes to show that in a nation of savers, you don't encourage spending by giving people money; you encourage spending by making consumption more attractive. For example, they could have set the consumption tax lower by a percent or two for a while.

Of course, this is assuming that the intent of the giveaway is to stimulate spending, and not to stimulate good feelings for the currently very unpopular prime minister (who is also facing an election soon).

Thinking back to when I first arrived on these shores a bit over 14 years ago, the things that really shocked me were the things that I had never thought about. I expected beer vending machines (now sadly disappearing), and to get shoved into crowded trains by guys in white gloves, because all the books were full of stories like that.

But it was the little things that got me. For example, when I first moved to Japan, my wife and I stayed at her sister's house until we got an apartment. My first day there, I had to use the toilet, but I checked and the door was closed. I went back to the living room, and got up every 10 minutes or so — but the door was always closed. After about an hour, I was getting antsy, and wondering who the heck stays in the toilet for an hour (remember, Japanese toilets are toilets only — usually not even a sink for washing up).

My wife saw me wandering back and forth, and asked me what was wrong. That's when I found out that in Japan, the toilet door is always kept closed. In all the US homes I've visited, the bathroom door is always cracked open slightly when not in use, so I'd assumed that the toilet was occupied. When you think about it, it is kind of strange to crack open the door and allow those smells out, but I think that most Americans would rather do that, than have people knock while they're using the commode.

There's something similar with public toilets. In most public toilets in Japan, the stall doors go all the way down to the floor, so you can't peek under them. Japanese people I've talked to say they hate using public johns in the US, where people can see their legs. Meanwhile, most Americans are glad that they can check if a stall is occupied, without having to knock (or have someone knock while you're in it).

One final toilet observation: a lot of Japanese men pee without holding their penises. Not that I'm a restroom perv, but it's hard not to notice these guys lined up at the urinals, with both hands on their hips… For a long time, I thought it was an adaptation to avoid having to wash their hands, because most public restrooms don't have paper towels (although nowadays a lot have air driers). But then when my son was a toddler, I noticed the other kids' Japanese moms were teaching them to pee without holding their penises, so now I'm not sure what the deal is. Maybe someday I'll conduct a survey of Japanese men … in the restroom, of course.

I recently bought the book いいまちがい (Japanese Made Funny), a bilingual collection of funny errors made by foreigners speaking Japanese.

One of my favorites was a guy who wanted a hamburger with no ketchup or other condiments. He calls up his Japanese friend, and asks him how to say "plain" in Japanese. The friend tells him it's 飛行機 (hikoki; "airplane"), and the guy proceeds to go to McDonald's and ask for a 飛行機のハンバーガー ("airplane" burger).

In this spirit, I'll share what I think is my funniest Japanese blunder. I had just come to Japan for the first time, as an exchange student. I had also just been married about four months before that.

I went to the neighborhood drug store to buy some condoms. I looked all over the store, but couldn't find them. Finally, I saw the store owner watching me, so I asked him. I didn't know the word for "condom" in Japanese, but I knew that in Spanish it's "condón," so I guessed and asked for コンドン (kondon — where the right word was コンドーム; kondoomu).

For some reason, the store owner thought I must be looking for cold medicine. He started going around and asking the customers, "Have you ever heard of a cold medicine called 'kondon'? This man is looking for 'kondon'." As a crowd started to gather round, I found it harder and harder to let the store owner know what I was really looking for; especially since it would probably have involved some rather expressive gestures.

Instead, I told him that I'd go home and look up the word I wanted in the dictionary, and high-tailed it out of there, leaving a bemused crowd of Japanese people behind me. After that, I avoided the store, but some time later I went in with my wife and bought some condoms — and saw the owner have an "aha" moment.

As an example, here are the sites of two very stylish companies: Apple and Sony.

Apple Website

Sony Japan Website

Sony's site is still quite beautiful, but it's a lot busier than the Apple site. I think it points to different aesthetic tastes between Japanese and Westerners. Sony of course is full of smart people (and Westerners as well), and they seem to get it — their US site is a lot cleaner than the Japanese site.

Sony US Website

One of the best illustrations of this difference in aesthetics is the Google home page versus the home page of Goo, which is one of the most popular search engines in Japan.

Google Website

Goo Website

When designing my Japanese-language website, my own preference would be to go for a clean design, but taking the tastes of my target audience into account, I think I should go for something a bit more genki. In fact, over the holidays I showed some popular Western sites to several Japanese people (great way to make yourself popular at parties, by the way…), and most of the reactions to sites I considered "clean" were along the lines of "drab," "lonely," "dreary," and "bleak." I've always found it fascinating that the culture that created wabi/sabi and haiku could prefer designs that most Westerners would consider garish, but there you have it.