Letter from the President

I went to Japan for business on October 18 to stay for a week in Tokyo. I have my small house on the east side of Tokyo, near Chiba-ken where I was raised until I finished high school. My mother used to live in this house; however, she moved to Bangkok, Thailand almost two years ago to live with my sister’s family in Bangkok. My sister has been working for Japan Airlines at the Bangkok Branch as a vice president of Japan Airlines in Thailand. Since my mother came to live with them, she has been helping to take care of my sister's kids during the weekdays. But she comes back to Japan a couple of times a year and so do I. My mother and I both coordinate our visits at the same time to visit Japan and to stay in our Tokyo home together.

So this October's visit, we made arrangements to come to Japan at the same time to stay at our Tokyo house. The last time we visited was in March this year. Over six month later, our small front yard has become very overgrown and wild, so I had to spend almost half of a day to take care of the front yard. Because our house and yard in Tokyo are very small compared with houses and yards in the US, it does not take as much time to get cleaned and organized in Tokyo as in the US. In this visit, we talked with a new neighbor who likes to plant flowers and we made an excellent deal with her to let her use our small yard to plant flowers in return for her to maintain the yard. 

The main purpose of my trip to Japan was to provide an HR Management seminar at Tokyo ANA (All Nippon Airlines) Hotel in collaboration with another consulting firm, Greenfield Overseas Assistance, Co., Ltd in Tokyo. Greenfield is a US Visa consulting firm working with Japanese corporations. Their clients are mainly HR professionals in Japanese companies. My seminar regarding US HR management systems is also a good niche area for them to attract their client’s interest as HR professionals. Due to Greenfield’s effective marketing and promotional efforts, we had 26 people attend my seminar. Tokyo ANA Hotel is a very nice hotel facility located in Akasaka, Tokyo, near the US Tokyo Embassy.

Another highlight of my trip this time, was an FPD International 2006 exhibition that I attended in Yokohama. FPD stands for "Flat Panel Display," including LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) Monitor, PDP (Plasma Display Panel) Module, OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) Light Source, and SED (Surface-condition Electro-emitter Display). Major FPD manufacturers, including Sharp, SONY, Samsung, Panasonic, Canon, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Hitachi and LG Philips, showed their largest sized commercial screens & displays.

To me, the most impressive exhibit was the Panasonic's display. Their plasma screen provided 103-inch wide screen and this was the largest sized screen throughout the entire exhibition. Their contents were also very impressive and creative. One program was a music performance created by East Village Opera Company in NYC, which is a fusion of classic opera music and modern rock music, using scenic spots in NYC. Another program was for an Australian transcontinental railroad train, " The Ghan." Australia's magnificent outback scenery was accompanied by music of the aborigine’s modern folk music group and showed a 47-hour luxury train journey on "the Ghan."

I think Panasonic brings us the exhibition winner for not just having the biggest panel size, but also providing superior content in a television program with scenery and music/theatrical performances. It was a totally fascinating exhibition and enlightening opportunity for me to learn about the display technology and the industry.

Ken Sakai
President

Ken Sakai
President

"Honyaku Kotohajime" (Beginnings of Translation) - No. 53
"Seminars on Translation for Translators"

In last month's issue, we discussed VATE (Value Added Trans-cultural Editing), which was introduced by Mr. Shintaro Tominaga. We invited him from Japan to our office and he held a seminar for our translators last month. Mr. Tominaga is an instructor at Fellow Academy, a translation school in Tokyo. He also has many experiences from traveling overseas and to foreign posts such as Southeast Asia, the USA, and Europe, and uses these experiences as examples and teaching aides in his seminars. For translators, it is a treasure-trove of information.

In Japan there are many translation schools, including the prestigious Fellow Academy. Because of the great demand and interest in translation from not only those wishing to become translators but also translators seeking to advance their abilities, these schools always have an abundance of students. Moreover, correspondence study courses in translation are provided regularly to serve those who can't attend in person. Unfortunately in the US, there seem to be very few such schools (except in the L.A. area) and correspondence study courses, in contrast to Japan. In those circumstances, you can see that translators in the US have relatively limited opportunities to receive and advance their education. In spite of such limited opportunities, two major conferences are held yearly for translators in America. One is the ATA Annual Conference (held from November 1 though the 4 in New Orleans this year) by the ATA (American Translators Association; www.atanet.org); the other is IJET (International Japanese/English Translation Conference) by the JAT (Japan Association of Translators; www.jat.org). IJET is chooses one country each year to host the conference, selecting from Japan and countries where the native language is English. Depending on the circumstances, it may take many years before the US will host the conference again (this past June it was held in the International Conference Center in Kobe, Japan, and next June it will be held at the University of Bath in England.).

Given these conditions, it would not be an exaggeration to say that translators in the US must improve their skills and proficiency by themselves. Of course, because translation is performed with individual comprehensive skills, it would seem natural that a translator's knowledge and skills would inevitably improve through the course of their work. Only by self-discipline, however, can we enhance our abilities as translators. To aid our staff in this endeavor, we underwent Mr. Tominaga's 'English Contract and Agreement Basics' seminar. He is a top-class translator in Japan, and I think inviting him to our office marks a milestone for our company.

A general seminar subject for translators is the understanding and basic knowledge of English contracts. The reason we chose this subject is because Mr. Tominaga teaches contract translation at Fellow Academy, and is an expert on the subject. The seminar, scheduled for two and a half hours, was held on a Saturday afternoon so that translators could more easily attend. To better facilitate additional questions and discussion the seminar actually ran three hours, leaving attendees with a more complete understanding of the subjects and no unanswered questions. One of the attendees came all the way from Atlanta, Georgia on a red-eye flight specifically to attend this seminar. She said that she could have attended the seminar via Skype, but she felt she gained much more by attending in person. We were impressed by her commitment to advancing her education.

Our staff also attended Mr. Tominaga's seminar on English contracts and all were very impressed by his in-depth knowledge and professional attitude. One of our full-time translators works from home in Florida, but she attended the seminar via Skype in real time. Because we were relying solely on Skype’s capabilities, I worried at first that she may be hard to hear, or have choppy video. However, my worries proved unfounded. She was in a remote place 2,000 miles away, but could participate in the seminar and gain valuable knowledge. This is the result of the Skype technology.

From here on, we will provide seminars periodically, conducted by Mr. Tominaga using Skype. We are planning to provide seminars not only on written agreements, but also on patent translation, legal and courtroom trial glossaries, a grammar series for translators (including articles and auxiliary verbs), and what a translator needs to do in order to change their field of focus, such as from the humanities to engineering translation. Mr. Tominaga already teaches these subjects at Fellow Academy, and will offer them for us in a seminar format.

Ken Sakai
President
E-mail: KenFSakai@pacificdreams.org

New Title Introduction: Shutting Out the Sun
by Michael Zielenziger

The world’s second-wealthiest country, Japan once seemed poised to overtake America. But its failure to recover from the economic collapse of the early 1990s was unprecedented, and today it confronts an array of disturbing social trends. Japan has the highest suicide rate and lowest birthrate of all industrialized countries, and a rising incidence of untreated cases of depression. Equally as troubling are the more than one million young men who shut themselves in their rooms, withdrawing from society, and the growing numbers of “parasite singles,” the name given to single women who refuse to leave home, marry, or bear children.

In Shutting Out the Sun, Michael Zielenziger argues that Japan’s rigid, tradition-steeped society, its aversion to change, and its distrust of individuality and the expression of self are stifling economic revival, political reform, and social evolution. Giving a human face to the country’s malaise, Zielenziger explains how these constraints have driven intelligent, creative young men to become modern-day hermits. At the same time, young women, better educated than their mothers and earning high salaries, are rejecting the traditional path to marriage and motherhood, preferring to spend their money on luxury goods and travel.

Smart, unconventional, and politically controversial, Shutting Out the Sun is a bold explanation of Japan’s stagnation and its implications for the rest of the world.

PDI thinks this though-provoking book will surely elicit some interesting conversations about the modern state of the Japanese society.

Order Online

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