10 things

Credo - 10 things you have to believe to be a Republican
Lies and Lying Liars who Fund Them

Just a couple of links to great entries in a health-related blog. Ok, so the first link is more of a rant about people dense enough to support Bush, but generally the authors' posts are really insightful and focused on health issues, but as health care is tied inextricably to the economy and politics, it's a pretty far-ranging topic.

Anyway, on to today's ramblings. I was in the movie rental store ("Family Book") the other day and noticed some of the changed titles on Japanese releases of "Foreigner" movies. Conan is no longer a Barbarian, he's Conan the Great. Kinda makes Arnie sound like a magician. Or there's Resident Evil becoming Biohazard, and many others. But the one that fascinated me was The Color of Money - which becomes Hustler 2. Why the 2? I couldn't find anything just called Hustler, let alone a prequel to Color. (Added Sep. 26 - Ok, so maybe there is a sort of prequel. See the comments. My bad.) Maybe just because Newman and Cruise were partners, but the title is still gibberish. It drives me nuts to watch language being butchered like this, and this is a mild example. I don't care if people anywhere want to change the titles of whatever they want to make more sense to the locals, but to make a mockery of someone else's language to do it is just lame. I know this in itself isn't really a big deal, but so many things in Japan do this. Some phrase that is at best vaguely recognizable as having some meaning in English becomes standard Japanese, to the point that even though borrowed foreign words are written in a separate alphabet (linguistic apartheid?) Japanese people often don't realize that it's actually neither Japanese nor real English. Things like "Everybody fashion!"(a current popular slogan) are part of the common vernacular.

Surely a huge cause of this is that English is considered pretty cool here and probably anywhere that still buys the mythology of the American Dream - I don't know how many times I've seen "American Coffee" advertised like it's gold - but it doesn't seem so much to ask that we not be constantly talked down to by people who insist the general public can't handle anything that takes more than 30 seconds to communicate. Japan's uniquely tortured, fashionable English is well-documented and famous but reaches well beyond its shores. Western celebrities who take spots in Japanese commercials for quick cash on the side usually seem to keep their integrity hovering at least a few millimeters off the floor - Tommy Lee Jones barely speaks or does so in Japanese in this Boss Coffee commercial, Kiefer Sutherland manages to make sense in his Calorie Mate spots, there are others from Ang Lee, Natalie Portman, Angelina Jolie, maybe we can pass off John Travolta's shot because it was the 80's and just a brand name anyway, and Ahnuld skips on English, not that that's unusual, but if anyone can find the spot Uma Thurman is in with the Kill Bill costume on a motorcycle spouting nonsense, I'd be much obliged. Now that's rock bottom. The whisky commercial with Bill Murray in Lost in Translation is not far off at all - obviously it's just a paycheck, but how hard can it be for someone with that kind of star power to look at a script written in their native tongue and suggest changes?

The company I work for is technically a publishing company, with a native English-speaking staff of around 300 and growing, but their publications and even their English textbooks are riddled with mistakes too typically Japanese and awkward to make on a keyboard to believe that they were just typos. Obviously someone was too proud to ask a decent proofreader to have a look. I can't help but picture the nephews of company chairmen all over the country assuming that their 6 months abroad made them fluent enough to write anything you please in English, and then unable to risk losing face by getting a proofreader even if they were willing to do so.

None of this is to say that Japanese is alone in this. We do it all the time in English, and to a far larger extent, given how eclectic and flexible the language is, and how far the British Empire stretched. Then there are helpless and confused Chinese characters tattoed all over people who couldn't be bothered to find out what they mean or get them done properly. French and Spanish words routinely have all their grace and music stripped when they get assimilated. English is like the Borg, it's the ten-cent whore of the language world. It just absorbs everything, which is both its beauty and its greatest weakness. Sure it's a language of amazing versatility (and don't even get me started on the "language of Shakepseare" bit), but that versatility brings the pitfall of believing there's no point in learning other languages, like the apocryphal stories of Americans who've never been more than 5 or 10 miles from home, despite the relative wealth, freedom, and opportunity to travel, because "we done got ever'thang a body needs right here". Aside from the mental benefits of bilingualism, especially from an early age, there are untranslatable words in every language.

Maybe I'm weird but I believe in knowledge for the sake of knowledge, learning just for the joy of it, art for art's sake, all that liberal hippy crap. I hope and believe that most people share that view, although I have to wonder how people of otherwise reasonable intelligence can not only believe in God but insist that God and science are mutually exclusive. If God created the universe, didn't he also create the laws of science that govern it? I don't go quite as far as Richard Dawkins in this clip from The Root of All Evil, where the premise is essentially that religion is destroying civilization, but I do believe that the spiritual benefits of any religion and the inner peace faith can bring have to be weighed carefully against the radical elements and intolerance that people seem determined to read into religious texts. (Yes, I do realize my topic is wandering a bit, check the title of the blog.)



On the other hand, maybe I'm just getting all preachy because what I ended up renting was V for Vendetta. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it, not as the typical Hollywood wire-fighting and stuff blowing up fare, but because it's a thought-provoking look at terrorism and the mindset that inspires it, and the idea that in the right circumstances it's not necessarily a bad thing. The movie doesn't offer pat answers about right and wrong, though it does lean towards V pretty strongly in most parts and is full of obvious references to the Bush administration.

Unfortunately the disc also included the pilot of "Supernatural", a mind-numbingly flat ghost story series that's probably old news or hopefully cancelled back home by now. I watched the entire painful episode hoping to find enough in the end to redeem it. No luck.

That's about all for today, I'll leave you with two things: one last photo, just a light chuckle. If you think God and Technology can't coexist, check out this computer school. And last, a reminder that mangling English can also be fun!