Oh the juvenile joys of living in a country where English is widely used…poorly… By poorly, I mean simply that you wouldn’t find that particular bit of English on an electronic scoring system screen in the US. It is, you must admit, a pretty natural usage, though. Just one you more often hear than read. Super short post!

Well, folks, my tourism project with ICIEA has finally come to a close. It was a lot of fun, and I’m thankful for the experience. I created a video to precede my talk to the crowd gathered at the international fair we held on Sunday last weekend. It was a pretty fun time. I enjoyed looking over the posters and photography from other monitor tourists before showing my DVDs and then getting up to speak. Those videos have been arranged in a playlist and embedded above. The first 2 in the playlist are available in full 1080p HD, so don’t miss out. The remaining 4 have been previously featured on this site.

Anyhoo – I was asked to deliver a bilingual speech, so I frequently repeated myself, I’m afraid. I’m fairly sure that both the Japanese people and the English speaking foreigners in the crowd were able to follow me reasonably well. My take: Imabari should play up its unique food heritage in a play to put itself on foreigners’ radar. I explained the concept of food tourism, and how most foreign people who go to Hiroshima go there in order to take in the history, the museums, and the sights. But they’d be foolish to miss out on some okonomiyaki while they’re there. (Am I right?)

Imabari is the crosspoint of 3 major arteries of transportation, yet people no longer stop here on their way elsewhere on Shikoku. I urged them to think about the slogan thought up by my friend Harry; “Shikoku Starts Here.” Great slogan! If only we could get some people to take a break from their travels, spend a night here, and eat some yakitori. That’s right, yakitori. Imabari is currently the #2 city in all of Japan for yakitori, and it has a unique take on it, at that. In Imabari, shops make yakitori on sheet metal griddles and handheld steel plates instead of on skewers over charcoal. It’s said that this type of yakitori started because Imabari people are impatient and they want their food lickety-split. (It’s also likely that the ship building industry’s presence meant that loads of scrap steel plates were readily available…) DELICIOUS, by the way.

Anyway, my other recommendations were for people to get online and add information to the English language Wikipedia and Wikitravel entries. (I also told them they could pay me to do it….semi-facetiously. Got some laughs. The offer still stands, if you’re reading this, guys. Ha ha. ) All in all, I think my suggestions were well received, and I think the event went well. I want to say kudos to the other foreigners who volunteered their time and to all of the Japanese staff who worked so tirelessly on this project. お疲れ様でした！

I may or may not bring this topic up once more on this blog. It seems there may be some newspaper articles coming up out of this. And it’s also possible that I’ll post a song about Imabari’s yakitori. (No joke. It was made when we were the #1 city for yakitori. Perhaps with the aid of foreign tourism, we can reclaim the title?)

The video basically explains itself. But here’s the company that I did this for – Ikeda & Co. You can even see me in the background of a few gallery photos now. I’ll see if I can get my hands on some sharper shots. Great time! I’ll see everyone after Silver Week.

Let me first start out by saying that this preview for Fox’s Human Target came to my attention back in May, but I figured I should wait a bit since the actual show won’t start until fall. Upcoming disappointment? I’m not sure. I know it’s based on a comic book, but I’ve no idea how good the comic is, or if this show will even come close to replicating it anyway. If Mark Valley’s supposed to be fluent in any number of other languages, we could feel the giddy excitement that comes from watching him maul them too. If it’s just Japanese, I’ve got to say that the actors in Heroes have totally whooped his behonkus. You can watch the actual full trailer from Fox Broadcasting below.

The show looks kind of fun, sure. I’m going to watch it, if for no other reason than to listen for any other horrendous Japanese lines. Gotta love the possible connotation of the elderly Japanese dude’s words to him, though, right? 「あなたの日本語はどこで習いましたか？」and「日本語上手ですね。」OUCH. The classic response. I’m kind of thrilled a bit that it was included in a realistic way. Ha ha.
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If anyone out there is a better listener than I am, please feel free to take a crack at the word that he said that I’ve got down as 《ふしょうねん？》in the captions. I have no clue what that was supposed to be. Admittedly, my vocabulary needs work, so if you can parse what he’s saying please leave a comment and I’ll correct the captions. I’d appreciate it. It’s gnawing away at me…and I’ve watched that clip more times than necessary…

The video I’ve embedded here, which subscribers may have already seen, is a segment from the NHK Matsuyama Branch about one of the summer camps I went to. I had commenters asking me what was being said. I knew that real subtitles (not hard subtitles, where the text is actually part of the video itself) were doable through the Closed Captioning options on YouTube. I’d seen it done bilingually lots of times by one of my favorite Japan-related YouTubers, Hikosaemon. (Go subscribe if you’re curious!) I set out to try and do so myself, but felt discouraged after watching several tutorials – all of which used Windows software. Until I could find a Mac-viable option, it looked like creating a text file with the proper format by hand was my only option…

Just in the nick of time, before I attempted to do captions the hard way, one of my commenters came to my rescue and told me to check out a free subtitling program called Miyu. (Thanks, shrgnatlas!) I downloaded the program and left it in the middle of my desktop so I could try it when I came back from Okinawa. As you’ve probably noticed, I’m back from Okinawa. Ha ha ha. I uploaded the files, and I’m stoked with the results. There are some line-length problems and whatnot, but I felt like it went pretty well for my first ever attempt at bilingual subbing!

I found using Miyu to be pretty easy once I got the hang of it. What I wound up doing was creating English subtitles first, and then using the same timing to swap Japanese subtitles in. Here are two screenshots of Miyu at at work, in English and Japanese. (And I’m just using the standard Mac OS Japanese input Kotoeri setup, by the way.) I’ve not pictured the playback monitor here, but it’s just the video with some editor controls on it and the text displayed with the proper timing – it updates as you alter things on the fly, too.

If you’re curious about the type of file that pops out of Miyu’s export dialog, here are my examples. I exported my subtitles as .srt files, which are recognized by YouTube. SRT files are actually just TXT files (like sooo many kinds of files out there) that follow a specific pattern – that’s why you can easily create them manually. If you’re curious like me, you might open these SRT files you’ve just created in the go-to Mac program TextEdit, but you might panic when you see the Japanese results. Let me assure you that this gobbledy-gook is to be expected – that file is the exact file that I uploaded to YouTube, and you can see that it renders there no problem. There is probably a different text editor that can handle the proper character encoding, but I’m too lazy to look it up. If you’d like to see the raw .srt files themselves, I’ve uploaded them to my server so you can take a peek. Please play around with the video above to swap out subtitle tracks on the go and compare. Then try your own hand at it and drop a link in the comments if you like.

We had the seasonal fall undokai (運動会, or Sports Day) at school on Wednesday, and I grabbed a golden opportunity. I asked for permission to shoot a timelapse video from the 3rd floor of the school building nearest the athletic grounds. When I had secured permission, I asked if I could borrow a tripod from the school and they found one. (Mine is currently living elsewhere and I’m attempting to purchase a Gorilla pod to replace it anyway.)

On the morning of the event I placed the camera and started recording just after the morning staff meeting. I locked the classroom door and left the camera to slowly capture one frame every ten seconds. After we finished cleaning up and before the post-event celebratory drinking party, I went back to stop the recording and retrieve the camera. I was more than pleased with the results. What do you think? Cool, right?

This first video shows a bunch of stuff in Naha and the southern parts of Okinawa’s main island. You’ll see clips from the Peace Memorial Park & Museum, Himeyuri Monument, the Naha Harbor Diner, Shuri Castle, and a bus trip northward to the Nago and Motobu area.

The second video features our visit to the Churaumi Aquarium, famous for having the largest single viewing window in any aquarium on earth (yes – bigger than Atlanta’s) and three whale sharks in the same tank. You’ll also see Cape Hedo, a lovely secluded beach where we snorkeled an afternoon away, a restaurant where we tried raw goat meat (yes…goat sashimi…with skin still attached, even…), and random good times in the area.

The final video is basically a ton of scuba diving. Why? Well, that’s kind of what we did in Okinawa. A ton of scuba diving. I went there hoping for 3 or 4 dives, but we pulled off 7 killer dives in the lovely tropical waters. Lots of seriously old reefs (they are freaking huge, mature architectural structures – amazing, really) to visit, fish to see, and nooks and crannies to explore. We did three dives at the Sunabe Sea Wall, one dive out at Okuma Beach Resort, and three more dives out in the Kerama Islands. Gorgeous. I hope to return and dive in the Ishigaki and Yonaguni areas someday. Perhaps with manta rays or hammerhead sharks.

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Here’s my game plan for the next week or so. First, I’ll post the videos that I’ve uploaded to YouTube over the break here as well. I’ve got a contest in the works, too. Then I’ll start to get back to my semi-regular posting. I’ll start off with these two videos

Coming soon: the NHK coverage of this year’s Nametoko English Camp and how I made English and Japanese subtitles for it to include on the YouTube version on my iMac. That’s right, I’m back. And yes – I will also continue the Japanese Tongue Twisters project.

Whoo hoo! The last video from the daytrip – the first stage of the Imabari City Foreign Tourism Project – has now been uploaded! Actually, I uploaded it ages ago and simply ran out of time to post it here, too, so many of you have already seen it. Anyhoo, as I hinted in the annotations on an earlier video, it contains a brief glimpse of a naked lady on a towel. Stay classy, Omishima. Ha ha.

In the video, you can see us enjoy some primo Hakata Salt Ice Cream. There’s a recipe available for it on the official Hakata Salt website – check it out if you’d like to give it a go. You can see the Japanese Wikipedia entry for the uber-impressive Oyamazumi Shrine on Omishima here. If you don’t read Japanese, you can just know that it houses a seriously astounding collection of Japanese National Treasures – in the form of oldschool armor. It’s great. The video finishes off with a few shots from the Tokoro Art Museum. My favorite part (other than the self-serve coffee and astounding view) was the wooden vending machine. I’d love it if it did give me change in toothpicks.