Now, picture all those family trips, and merge it with memories of when your family comes to visit you at home. Have you ever moved to a new city and then acted as your family’s tour guide when they came to see you? Great—now imagine that you made a really big deal out of this city for a long time. You read books, you watched movies, you even studied a completely new language because you were so into this place. You talked about it a lot, even though maybe nobody else was particularly interested. Let’s call that place Japan (my city was Tokyo, but obviously yours might be different). Can you picture it? Now your family is coming to visit and they want you to show them around. Feel that mixture of pride and panic? What are you going to do? How is this going to work?

It’s been about three years now since this happened to me, but I still remember plenty of tidbits of wisdom from my own experience. I was studying abroad in Tokyo when my grandparents, mom, and great-aunt flew over for a ten day adventure in Japan, traveling from Tokyo to Hakone, Kanazawa, Kyoto and back, from March 6 to 16, 2011 (yes, during the Tohoku earthquake). Looking back, I can think of two major considerations that you need to think of when you do this.

1. Taking care of them (especially if they don’t know anything about the country) and…
2. Taking advantage of their company.

Let’s get started by looking at the first one.

Taking Care Of Your Family

When it comes to taking care of your family, there are three main things to think about. Food, shelter, transportation, and weather. Pretty basic, right? Still, there’s a lot of little things you have to keep in mind. It’s your family’s first trip, after all, and with the new location they may not be thinking about these things in quite the right way, so it’s your job to think for them!

Feeding Your Family:

If you’re from a culture that’s very different from Japan, food might end up being the biggest challenge. Not to mention each family member will have different tastes. My family, for example, is not fond of seafood, which makes choice in Japan pretty limiting. Maybe your family has a vegetarian or (God forbid) a vegan. Japan’s vegetarian/vegan scene is near nonexistent. There are certain Japanese foods I’ve found to be generally acceptable (at least to a Western palette) includes:

• Noodles (ramen, udon, soba)
• Donburi (a bowl of rice with some kind of meat on top)
• Tempura
• Curry (which is sweeter than Indian curry and kind of similar to stew).

Going beyond Japanese cuisine, you can usually find “Western” options like Italian or steak restaurants, although it will be fairly different from what your family is used to. In the bigger cities, you may recognize some Western chain restaurants (and of course, that includes McDonalds).

Quick Tips:

• Be careful with the curry restaurants—they leave a strong impression. My mother is convinced that curry is all we ate.
• Sometimes Japanese-language menus have different prices than English ones, so if you can read Japanese you may want to get at least one Japanese menu.
• If you do, watch out for the katakana. I accidentally ordered raw beef on the trip because I didn’t connect タルタル (tarutaru) with tartare (raw beef). I ate it anyway, and now it’s a family joke.
• Convenience stores usually have something for everyone. It’s a good way to start the day for breakfast, plus they can marvel at how not sketchy things are.

If you really want to impress your family with “weird” Japanese food (it’s not weird, but your family will maybe think it is), okonomiyaki is very foreigner-friendly. Call it a Japanese Pizza or a Japanese Pancake (I’ve heard it both ways), it has a simple base of flour, egg, and shredded lettuce and is topped with mayonnaise and a sweet glaze, and you can add pretty much anything you want to it. For bonus points, make sure the restaurant has table grills so you can watch a waiter cook it in front of you and/or make it yourself. Everyone can order something different and cut their pancake into pieces to share. I took my family to a restaurant like this in Shibuya on their second night, and they talk about it to this day!

If your family has dietary restrictions, first be aware that a lot of Japanese soy sauces are made with gluten, and they are used in a lot of dishes. Restaurants and waitstaff may not be very familiar with gluten allergies, so people with sensitivity to gluten should exercise their own judgement when eating out. Vegetarians may need to do the same, because I’ve seen waiters recommend “肉なし” (niku nashi–no meat) dishes that had fish or even processed meat. “Niku nashi” ramen or other soups may have beef or fish broth. (Nobody’s trying to trick anyone, it’s just that not everyone shares the same idea of what constitutes meat). You can usually find more tips for working around these issues in travel guides and on blogs like NeverEndingVoyage.com.

Where To Stay:

As for hotels, keep in mind the age and health of the people you’re traveling with! My friends and I had a blast at a ryoukan in Nikkou, but you should probably avoid Japanese-style rooms if you are traveling with older people. If they didn’t grow up sleeping on the floor, it will probably be too hard on their backs and joints now. For the same reason, you may want to be aware of how close your hotel is to public transportation to avoid long walks.

Quick Tips

• You may want to double-check whether your proposed hotel is meant for business travelers, particularly if you’re sharing rooms. We ended up with a salaryman-type hotel in Kyoto and it was noticeably more cramped than our other hotels.
• If you’re traveling with younger family members then capsule hotels may be a lot of fun (for one or two nights). Keep in mind that the bath may be shared. Some people aren’t going to be comfortable with that.

While I like to think that a hotel is just a place to sleep between activities, there’s a couple of general pointers I’d like to throw out there. First, Japanese hotels tend to be smaller than their Western counterparts. Second, hotels that come with breakfast are awesome. Usually (but not always) the breakfasts are quite nice. Third, in general, hotels near main stations are going to be pricey when compared to their quality. If you stay at a hotel next to a station that isn’t the biggest in the city, or if you are able to stay somewhere a little further from the station, prices are going to drop down a bit. Just depends on how much money you want to spend!

How To Travel:

You can travel in Japan by foot, bicycle, car, taxi, or airplane… but train is by far the easiest and most efficient when it’s available (and it’s available a lot). Foreign tourists can and should buy the Japan Rail Pass, which offers unlimited passage on JR trains, including the shinkansen (bullet train) for 7, 14, or 21 consecutive days. There is one caveat, though: It can only be purchased outside of Japan and is invalid for non-tourist visas, so if you are studying abroad or working in Japan, no JR Pass for you. Use the online route planner at Hyperdia.com to figure out which train you want and what transfers you may need to take, then make your free seat reservations at the JR office in any major train station. The best guide I’ve seen for the JR Pass can be found here.

There are also going to be times where it may be worth taking a taxi. Grandma can’t walk as much as she used to, after all. Split between several family members the cost isn’t too terrible, though it is definitely going to be more expensive than taking the train. Taxis are everywhere, but just make sure you know where you want to go. A surprising number of taxi drivers seem to not know their cities very well. That being said, taxis are plentiful. If you find them lacking, though (maybe you’re visiting someplace pretty inaka aka the countryside) you can find taxi phone numbers inside of phone booths or you can simply ask the clerk at a convenience store to call a taxi service for you. Make sure to buy a bottle of tea or an onigiri as a way to say arigato.

How To Pack:

My grandparents are well-traveled and usually take one big bag for the two of them on their trips, so they were a little skeptical when I told them to bring a carry-on sized bag for each of them. It’s easier to maneuver on the shinkansen, subway, and buses, and lighter to carry (or wheel) if and when you need to walk part of the way to the hotel. Not to mention the crowded subway and train stations – A giant bag like that will just get in the way. I think they admitted I was right when we had to walk up a mountain in Hakone.

As for what to pack, the only special advice I gave my family was to bring their own medications (you can get things like basic painkillers in Japan, of course, but the dosages are different) hygiene products, and to not worry too much about forgetting anything else, because you can probably buy it in Japan. They were seriously worried when I told them a lot of shrines, temples, and other sites don’t have toilet paper in their bathrooms though, and packed a good supply of personal tissues (but if you spend a lot of time in a big city like Tokyo, you’ll probably pick up a collection of free personal tissues anyway).

I also recommended to my family to bring a little less than they think they need. There are washers and dryers in most hotels. Plus, if you find yourself running out of tshirts or underwear, there’s always a Uniqlo nearby to get you through a couple more days. You’re also going to surely bring back a lot of things too. That means extra space in your suitcase will help your family to accommodate the purchases made along the way. Keeping everything in that one carry-on suitcase will make those mountain treks all the more pleasant.

Seasons & Weather:

Finally, think about the weather! This will really depend on where your family is from and what they’re used to, but I’ll try my best. My mom, for example, refuses to ever travel to Japan again in March because it was “too cold,” so maybe she’d like something a little warmer. That being said, your family may be from Greenland, so avoiding August may be a good idea (you may be shocked at hot hot and humid Japan can get). Here are some general tips about the weather. Please adjust accordingly to your family’s preferences.

January, February, March: New Years is a lot of fun and something your family may enjoy. That being said, it’s pretty cold. But, if your family can deal with the cold, it also happens to be one of the driest, sunniest times of the year for Japan. Plus, after New Years tourist spots are less crowded. It’s a win-win unless you can only do warmer weather. The Northern half of Japan is probably getting some snow. Hokkaido is probably buried in it.

April: Cherry blossom season is happening. There’s a little more rain, but in general it’s pretty sunny (though still kind of cold). It’s warmer than January-March, for sure, but only just by a little. The end of April is Golden Week, so if you don’t like crowds and lots of people traveling, avoid this time.

May: The beginning of May is also Golden Week. Same thing applies: Lots of people are traveling, lots of places are crowded. That being said, after Golden Week everyone goes back to their regular lives and the weather is pretty nice. Not too hot, not too cold. Slightly rainier, but not super rainy (unless you’re down in Okinawa, then expect some rain).

June, July, August: Welcome to rainy season. It’s going to be overcast and rainy, so this might be something worth avoiding. June/July is a nice time to visit Hokkaido. After the rainy season (early or mid June) it becomes hot and humid. Like, really hot and humid. July and August are not good times for people who don’t like heat and humidity. Note that typhoon season really gets going in August.

September, October: These two months tend to consist of more typhoons. It’s not constant typhoon after typhoon, but they can put a damper on your travel plans. Usually by mid or late October the typhoons stop, making October a nice time to travel (once the humidity breaks, anyways). It’s hard to know exactly when this will happen, but second half of October is a pretty good bet.

November, December: Like January – March, these months are fairly dry and not rainy. The temperature is usually a little warmer in November too, making it a nice time to travel. Some warm-weather loving families won’t be too pleased with the weather, but the lack of rain and the lack of freezing temperatures make it a pretty safe bet to travel. December is more of the same, though colder. It does lead up to New Years though, which is fun!

For a full breakdown of weather, month-by-month, be sure to visit Japan-Guide’s When To Travel page.

For my family, when they came in March it was too cold for them (thank goodness they didn’t come November-February!). There was still snow at the time, and waiting in line to get into museums and other tourist attractions wasn’t their idea of fun. We even rode some tourist buses in a full circle, waiting for the lines to die down (then we got out and went inside the museum).

Taking Advantage Of Your Family (Not Just Paying For Things)

Photo Jim G

Before my family came to visit, I had already been to Kanazawa and Kyoto, so I can say this having experienced both sides: while you and your friend may try to play it cool on your backpacking trip (fooling no one, by the way), when you’re with your family, there is no way to look less like a tourist. Give up and embrace it. There are lots of embarrassingly touristy things to do that can actually be pretty fun.

First of all, embrace the tours and tour guides, in whatever form they come in. In Nara my friend and I avoided the volunteers at Nara Station out of a mix of bashfulness and youthful desire to somehow seem less touristy. My grandparents possessed neither sentiment and off we went, trailing behind an energetic English-speaking retiree who literally took us to every temple and shrine in the city (apparently they form a convenient circuit, which my friends and I never realized on that first trip).

Besides seeing even more temples, I learned more about the history of each, found out how to make the deer bow, and for some reason took a picture with a mother and her newborn son in traditional christening attire. In Kyoto, my friends and I explored the geisha district, but missed a lot of key information and major sites that was later covered on the walking tour my grandparents signed us up for. I’m not saying my friends and I did it wrong the first time; I’m just saying it can be easier to do these potentially corny or embarrassing things with family.

It turns out that a lot of Japanese people are very proud of their culture and keen to show it off to interested tourists. Once I started going around with my pack of relatives, a surprising number of people came over to chat or went out of their way to show us something interesting. One woman approached us in a public park and asked if we would be interested in seeing traditional Japanese wedding clothes—her son and his fiancé would soon be coming to take their engagement photos. And frankly, as awkward as I found the offer at the time, it was pretty much the only chance I had during my year in Japan to see something like that. I even found out that the groom was an alumni of the school I was studying at.

What I’m trying to say is, even though my family’s enthusiasm and eagerness (for some reason) embarrassed me, their openness and interest appealed to a lot of people we met and gave me a chance to see and experience a side of Japan I didn’t see as an exchange student. Although acting as a 24-hour tour guide sometimes felt like herding cats, traveling with my family was a fun way to rediscover Japan and show them what the big deal was. And despite a looming nuclear meltdown overshadowing the last half of the trip, everybody still says it was one of the best they’ve ever been on.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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The Kyoto Prize was established in 1985 by Kazuo Inamori, a successful businessman and philanthropist who was inspired by the Nobel Foundation’s goal of honoring significant contributions to humanity. In developing the prize he consulted closely with the Nobel Foundation to be sure that the Kyoto Prize would complement — and not rival or attempt to overshadow—the Nobel Prize. Thus the Kyoto Prize recognizes achievements in the general fields of Advanced Technology, Basic Sciences, and Arts and Philosophy*, and the cash prizes are somewhat smaller.

When Inamori developed his philosophy for the Kyoto Prize, he wrote that:

“Those worthy of the Kyoto Prize will be people who have… worked humbly and devotedly, sparing no effort to seek perfection in their chosen professions. They will be individuals who are sensitive to their own human fallibility and who thereby hold a deeply rooted reverence for excellence. Their achievements will have contributed substantially to the cultural, scientific, and spiritual betterment of mankind. Perhaps most importantly, they will be people who have sincerely aspired through the fruits of their labors to bring true happiness to humanity.”

The contributions that the winners of the Kyoto prize have made to our world and society are too many to go over them all, at this point. But, in order to teach you more about the Kyoto Prize and the people involved with it, I’d like to tell you the story of two men: One who created the Kyoto Prize (Kazuo Inamori) and one who won it (statistician Akaike Hirotsugu). Both of these men embodied the ethos of the Kyoto Prize and coincidentally had very interesting lives.

September 1, 1939 (Beginning of World War II)

Hirotsugu:

Our story begins in 1939, with the advent of World War II. Twelve-year-old Akaike Hirotsugu, the youngest son of a silkworm farmer from Shizuoka, would soon enter the Naval Academy in Etajima, Hiroshima. His uncle was a Navy pilot.

Inamori:

Halfway across the country, in Kagoshima, seven-year-old Kazuo Inamori was in his second year of elementary school.

September 1, 1949

Hirotsugu:

Hirotsugu just barely missed the war—it ended the year before his class would graduate. It was a shock to realize they would not follow their upperclassmen into battle and death. Instead, as the Imperial Navy was disbanded and the Academy closed, the headmaster of the Naval Academy told his former students their new job was to live and focus on rebuilding their devastated country.

While reading a mathematics book that had belonged to his late uncle, Hirotsugu decided to focus on mathematics. Under the old education system, he was forced to enroll in high school and only recently graduated. He entered the Mathematics Department of the University of Tokyo.

Inamori:

Kazuo’s home was destroyed in an air raid near the end of the war, on top of which he was soon bedridden with tuberculosis. A neighbor gave him a religious book to read, which comforted him and gave him a sense of purpose. In 1949, Kazuo was still in high school. He was actually rejected from the top school in the area, and would continue to be rejected when he applied for top universities.

September 1, 1959

Hirotsugu:

At Todai, Hirotsugu disdained the heavy focus on theory and instead taught himself probability and statistics. He joined the Institute of Statistical Mathematics after graduating in 1952. His first major success called upon his roots farming silkworms to help Akinori Shimazaki find a way to continuously spin thread from multiple silkworm cocoons without leaving gaps when a cocoon ran out. His technique, called a “gap process”, helped predict when the ends of the cocoon would drop. Shimazaki was so successful in implementing this technique that he was awarded Japan’s first doctorate in sericulture (silk agriculture) engineering.

Inamori:

Kazuo graduated from the engineering department of Kagoshima University in 1955 and joined an insulator manufacturing company, but he quit last year over a disagreement with the technology director. He just started his own company, Kyoto Ceramic Ltd, at the ripe old age of 27. He would soon struggle with collective bargaining demands from his workers, and develop the company motto: 敬天愛人 (Respect the Divine and Love People).

September 1, 1969

Hirotsugu:

Early in the decade, Hirotsugu and his friends started a statistics study group for fun. While obviously a barrel of laughs, it had the added benefit of giving him industrial contacts. He recently had success developing a kiln controller for manufacturing cement. The only problem was, his partners at the factory wouldn’t leave him alone! Only a statistician could reliably choose the correct statistical models for the controller.

Hirotsugu knew he needed to come up with a standard procedure for deciding on a model, which even a non-statistician could use. But if he did so, it was inevitable that the procedure would not always give the best result. As he thought about this conundrum, he recalled his recent experiences as a visiting professor at Princeton and Stanford. “People in the US,” he would later explain, “are pragmatic in the sense that if they can get a reasonable result, they think it’s okay. So… I decided if I could produce a fairly reasonable answer, then that would be sufficient.” His development of the Final Prediction Error would allow the engineers at the cement factory to adjust their models without his help.

Inamori:

Kazuo, meanwhile, was quite busy himself. As an upstart youngster from a less than prestigious school, establishing himself in Japan had been a struggle. Like Sony and Honda before him, he turned to the USA. His first overseas business trip was in 1962, and after accepting a large order of ceramic casings for computer chips from IBM, he just established a Kyocera International office in the United States.

September 1, 1979

Hirotsugu:

At the beginning of the decade, Hirotsugu had an epiphany. On the train on his way into work, he suddenly realized that he could adapt his solution at the cement factory to pretty much all statistics everywhere**. He called this new tool An Information Criterion, or AIC, with every expectation of future generations refining the theory and developing a BIC, a DIC, and so on. Last year he created BIC (Bayesian Information Criterion) himself. This year he’s been busy studying a thermal power plant.

Inamori:

Kazuo continued to grow Kyoto Ceramics (Kyocera), which was now listed on several stock exchanges. After the Oil Crises of 1973, he convinced Panasonic (then called Matsushita Electric Industrial), Sharp Corp., and others to establish a joint venture called Japan Solar Energy Corp.

September 1, 1989

Hirotsugu:

This was the Hirotsugu’s third year as the Director General of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics. Although this kept him pretty busy, he still managed to publish an impressive amount of research.

Inamori:

Now officially called Kyocera, Kyoto Limited kept growing. Kazuo started a school for business owners called Seiwajuku in 1982, but apparently felt this was not enough. In 1984 he founded the non-profit Inamori Foundation with his own money. In consultation with the Nobel Foundation, he also established the Kyoto Prize.

In addition to all this philanthropy, Kazuo got into the cell phone business two years previous, creating a new company called DDI.

September 1, 1999

Hirotsugu:

Hirotsugu retired five years previous, and has since been working on his golf swing. Within two years he would publish an analysis of it.

Inamori:

DDI, now called KDDI, was a phenomenal success. As the leader of two multimillion dollar companies, Kazuo was considered one of the greatest businessmen to come out of the post-war era. Four years previous, he “retired” and entered the Buddhist priesthood. To no one’s surprise, however, he continued to be involved as “chairman emeritus”, and even met with the future president of China.

September 1, 2009

Hirotsugu:

In 2006, Hirotsugu Akaike—already declared Second Class Order of the Sacred Treasure—was presented with the Kyoto Prize in Mathematical Sciences for his work with AIC. Here is the text of his commemorative lecture. Among the honors he received throughout his lifetime were the Asahi Prize and the Purple Ribbon Medal, two of the highest honors in Japan. He died of pneumonia in August of 2009.

Inamori:

Kazuo established academies and research centers at Kagoshima, Kyushu, Kyoto, and Case Western Universities. He received honorary degrees from Kyushu and Case Western. This year he would receive the “Entrepreneur for the World” Award in Lyons, France.

2014

Left: Hirotsugu. Right: Inamori.

If you’ve ever studied engineering, natural, or social sciences, chances are you had to take a statistics class. And if you ever took a statistics class, you are almost guaranteed to have come across AIC (now known as Akaike’s Information Criterion). Its creator overcame severe depression in the years after WWII by watching a goldfish swim freely in a pond, and realized that “respecting [his] own and others’ lives was the basis of morality”. What do you think? Did he meet Kazuo’s criteria for the prize?

As for Kazuo, he is still alive and very active. You might argue (and some have) that it was ego, and not humanitarianism, that led him to try to create a prize equal to the Nobel. I encourage you to look him up and decide for yourself. But you should also look up this year’s Kyoto Prize winners and see if they aren’t just as worthy of honor as a Nobel laureate.

Sources:

• Akaike: Akaike, H., “A new look at the statistical model identification,” Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on , vol.19, no.6, pp.716,723, Dec 1974 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.proxy.libraries.smu.edu/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1100705&isnumber=24140
• Akaike, H., “Golf Swing Motion Analysis: An Experiment on the Use of Verbal Analysis in Statistical Reasoning”, Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, vol. 53, no. 1 pp. 1-10, Mar 2001
• Findley, David F., Emanuel Parzen, “A Conversation with Hirotsugu Akaike”, Statistical Science, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 104—117, Feb 1995 http://projecteuclid.org.proxy.libraries.smu.edu/euclid.ss/1177010133.
• Tong, H., “Professor Hirotsugu Akaike, 1927-2009”, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society), vol. 173 no. 2, pp. 451-454, Apr 2010
• Inamori: Friedman, Y. “Case studies in innovation: What enables outstanding achievements?”, Journal of Commercial Biotechnology, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 95-97, Apr 2010.
• http://global.kyocera.com/inamori/history/index.html
• “INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS: Eyes on Higher Things And on the Bottom Line; Not the Usual Retirement Ahead For a Master of Corporate Zen.” The New York Times, April 2, 1997 , Wednesday, Late Edition – Final

*(Within these fields, one of four categories is honored on a rotating basis: Electronics, Biotechnology, Materials Science and Engineering, and Information Science for Advanced Technology; Biological Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Life Sciences for Basic Science; and Music, Arts, Theater, and Thought and Ethics for Arts and Philosophy.)

*An attempt to explain: When you measure the different factors that might help explain a particular result (for instance, calories consumed, exercise, and height might all help explain your weight), sometimes not all of the variables are important. Keeping unimportant variables in a statistical model can even make important variables seem less important than they really are. Model selection is when you analyze statistical models that use different mixes of the variables and decide which model gives the best explanation for your results. Many scientists, engineers, statisticians, and other researchers choose their model by finding the model with the lowest AIC (or its cousin, BIC).

It’s All Relative

As it turns out, there are lots of people out there who don’t speak any Japanese at all! So over the summer, I put on my big-girl suit (I don’t remember, it probably wasn’t a suit) and finally managed to convince some poor fool to pay me to translate Japanese for them. By which I mean I went to go talk to the curator of a private collection of samurai armor in my city and tried really, really hard to sound like I knew what I was talking about. I was actually asking for a job… but instead I was asked to translate papers that sometimes came with the armor they purchased (turns out the curator only speaks French).

Now I work a completely separate, full-time job, and every once in a while I get a request to translate documents (mostly auction materials) for this collection, which I do in the evenings. So although I’m getting paid, I’m not sure I would consider myself a professional translator. But since I’m sure there are plenty of Japanese students out there who have something they want to translate (books, manga, song lyrics, whatever), I thought I’d share my approach. I’d also love to hear what other people do, because frankly I’m pretty new at this.

*The collection I translate for will remain nameless for privacy reasons and because I don’t want anybody to steal my job.

Getting Ready To Translate

After dinner, I sit down to work. I open the e-mail, and take a moment to freak out when I can’t read anything on the page. Honestly, these articles should be considered way above my level, but this is the kind of situation where you “fake it ‘till you make it”.

The first thing I have to do is convert the images my client sends me into text. (Standard practice is to charge by the character, so at the very least I need it for an accurate character count). I can try a text-converting program or just type everything up myself, depending on the quality of the image. This time my client has sent me both the image and the converted text (plus a botched Google translation, to remind me that she needs me). I copy and paste the text into a Google Doc and prepare my workspace.

This involves opening several tabs: Google Translator, Jisho.org, and Kotobank.jp. I also turn Rikaichan on in my browser, which is especially useful because I can wave my mouse over any word in the Google Doc to get a definition. If this seems like cheating to you, wait a little while and you’ll see why I don’t waste time on relatively common vocabulary.

1. Rough Draft

Remember this: the key is just to get English on the page.

Now that it’s time to actually start translating, I wave my mouse over the first unfamiliar word (unfortunately, it’s the title of the article). Uh-oh. Rikaichan is only defining the individual characters. “Iron earth” is not an acceptable description for a helmet, so I copy and paste the phrase into Google Translator.

Still no good. Jisho and Kotobank don’t give me anything either so I put a star next to this and move on.

I spend 15 minutes trying to find the meaning of 車患 before I look at the original image and realize the text converter has badly misread 鯱. This is why you always need to double-check converted text. I go through and correct all of the misread kanji before continuing. (鯱, by the way, is しゃちほこ/shachihoko, a mythical dolphin/whale/fish thing. Nagoya Castle is famous for the two golden shachihoko on its roof).

鯱の胴体部は背を中心に鉄薄板に鱗を打出した二枚を左右から合わせ
形成し、これに眉庇を兼用する鯱の頭部の鬼面を被せ…
For the body of the dolphin / in the middle of the back / in iron lacquer / two plates with embossed fish scales / join on the left and right to take form / these scales also serve as mabisashi / and the dolphin’s head / covers a demon’s mask

Unlike English, the Japanese language does not frown upon run-on sentences. I think they would actually rather add modifiers to an existing sentence than make a new one if the subject of the sentence is the same. For this first draft I am trying to stay as close to the original Japanese meaning as possible, so I separate ideas with “/”. Later I will rearrange everything to make more sense with English grammar.

A lot of words I come across are jargon, specific to ancient Japanese armor. They either don’t appear in a Japanese-English dictionary or have a second, more common meaning. That’s when I go to Kotobank, a Japanese-Japanese dictionary, to find the more obscure definition. You can do this even if you still have a lower vocabulary level, because all you have to do is use Rikaichan on words you don’t know.

The key to getting this far is making educated guesses about the meanings you don’t know. If you’re still not sure you understand, you can try a search using the romanization of the word (in this case, マビサシ comes out to mabisashi). You might find something like this:

Number 12 is “Forehead plate – mabisashi (眉庇). Mystery solved! Thanks Wikipedia.

Everything I’ve written about so far has taken place in the first sentence of the text! Granted, it’s a run-on sentence that takes up most of the first paragraph, but you can see why this might take a while. And that was just the first draft–it has English words but makes no real sense in English. Plus, there were several words (I’m looking at you, 鉄地) that I couldn’t translate the first time around. Hopefully they’ll make more sense as I figure out the context that they are written in.

2. Second Draft

An English sentence like the one below isn’t exactly easy to understand:

For the body of the dolphin / in the middle of the back / in iron lacquer / two plates with embossed fish scales / join on the left and right to take form/ these scales also serve as mabisashi / and the dolphin’s head / covers a demon’s mask / on the left and right / large scales and koshimaki boards / are hammered into place with rivets.

This is actually where Google Translate is the most helpful, believe it or not.

Okay, so a key part of Google’s translating algorithm is based off of statistical survey of websites and documents that are written in multiple languages. The algorithm compares the English version with the Japanese (or Spanish, or Arabic) version to see how the words correspond. If, in several different sources, 日本 (nihon) corresponds with “Japan”, then that is how Google will translate it. The program is getting more sophisticated over time, and it can now recognize some common grammatical structures. This means that I can sometimes put a chunk of text into Google translator to see how the grammar is most commonly translated.

I’ll go ahead and use a different (shorter) sentence. Here, “鬼面の眼球には鍍金板が嵌入され” comes out to “Plating plate is fitted to the eye of the devil mask”. Uh… yeah, that doesn’t make sense. But I already figured out in my first draft that “in the eyeball of the kimen (a special armor term) / gilt strips are inlaid”. So now I can write “Gilt strips are fitted to the eye of the kimen”. That makes sense, right? This isn’t a foolproof method, but as one of several references, it can be helpful. I go through the whole first draft like this, to get a working English version. Sometimes I do a third draft as well.

3. Cleaning Up

Translating is more of an art than a science. The articles I translate need to be functional, because my client is trying to understand more about the piece of armor. There may be phrases I don’t understand (what the heck is 鉄地?!) and I need to come up with a reasonable guess. In the case of 鉄地 I decide to ignore the 地 (chi, earth) character because I thought “iron helmet” was more to the point, and “iron earth helmet” would have just been confusing. If I’m particularly concerned about something, I’ll include “Notes” in my translation. For instance, once a passage had several typos, including a wrong date and a wrong location. I translated the information as it was written, and corrected it in the Notes.

As a last resort, sometimes I just have to ask a native speaker of Japanese. There are lots of things I don’t know because I didn’t grow up in Japan, so if I absolutely can’t figure something out myself (whether a given location is, in fact, a typo, for instance) I’ll get in touch with one of my Japanese friends.

Waiting for the moment that you understand absolutely everything perfectly means never using your Japanese. Whether it’s for fun or for profit, it’s a good idea to take chances and use your Japanese, whatever level you’re at. Even if it didn’t have the added benefit of improving your Japanese, it’s rewarding to actually use a skill you’ve worked so hard to get.

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