Even though I was way too young to gamble the first time I visited Japan, pachinko really interested me. My dad tried to take us into a pachinko parlor to see what the hubbub was about, but the staff quickly spotted a then 10-year-old Hashi and kicked us out.

During Tofugu’s trip to Japan this year, I decided to give pachinko a try since I was finally old enough. I put in my hundred yen coin and my eyes glazed over as lights flashed, a screen lit up, and little silver balls bounced around.

I didn’t understand a damn thing that was going on, but I won a small prize and decided to retire at the top of my game.

As we’ve written about a bit before, pachinko is a huge industry in Japan. It’s raked in incredible profits over the years, and played all across Japan. When we visited, we saw people lining up at pachinko parlors before they’d even opened.

How does the pachinko industry keep people interested? After all at its core, pachinko is an extremely simple, not very interactive game. But to keep this multi-trillion yen industry afloat, the industry has a lot of incentive to keep players entertained.

Technological Advancements

The backs of pachinko machines from the 40^s and current day

The podcast 99% Invisible recently did a really interesting story about the evolution of slot machines in the US. What started out as a one-armed bandit has turned into a monstrous, complex, computerized machine that uses sophisticated algorithms to slowly bleed people of their money.

When I thought about it, I realized that the same thing has more or less happened with pachinko machines.

They started out simply enough. Even I could probably build a pachinko machine the way they were built in the early days. Get a wooden board, hammer in a few nails, drill a few holes, and you more or less have an early, primitive pachinko machine.

But if you crack open the back of a modern-day pachinko machine, you’ll see something that looks more like a computer than a woodworking. Circuit boards, wires, and power supplies line the inside power the modern pachinko machine.

The site Vintage Pachinko has a great visual history of pachinko machines from the 40^s to current day, showing both the front and the exposed back of the machines. It’s astounding to see how the electronic parts and circuitry grow exponentially over the decades.

Flashing lights and speakers on machines catch a player’s attention. Features like rapid-firing pachinko machines and motorized handles let players go through balls quicker (and therefore spend more money), and the math behind the placement of the nails within the machine have gotten increasingly sophisticated.

The technology is only one half of the equation. The variety of the machines, whether it’s the branding, the type of game, or the price, also play a big part in bringing in players and keeping them planted in front of the machines.

Variety

You can only do so much with technology; at some point, you have to go beyond the circuitry and appeal to customers in other ways.

Branding

Pachinko machines are cycled out of parlors at an astounding rate, not only to keep up with technological advances, but to also keep up with the current cultural trends too.

In Japan, I saw lots of pachinko machines that branded themselves after pop culture staples like AKB48 and the newest Evangelion movie. Foreign franchises get their own pachinko machines too, like Western movies or Korean dramas.

While your everyday pachinko addict probably doesn’t care too much if some pop star is staring back at them while little metal balls bounce around the machine, they appeal to hardcore fans and might draw people into pachinko parlors who otherwise might not be there.

Plus, it gives the parlors a sense of being current and relevant. See, we know what the kids like! AKB48! Now who wants to play some pachinko?

Games Within Games

If you don’t have the licensing rights to stick a celebrity’s face on the front of your pachinko machine, what else can you do to differentiate your game? For one, you can add on new functionality.

You’ll see a lot of machines nowadays incorporate slot machine functionality in to pachinko by using the screen in the middle of the machine. Balls landing in certain spots trigger the machine to start spinning and basically start another game altogether. It’s like a game within a game!

There’s also variance on how much you can bet on a machine. Balls for a pachinko machine vary in price a little bit, the way that slot machines do—you might have slot machines that take quarters, but there are also nickel and penny machines too.

Same goes for pachinko. Per ball, prices range anywhere between ¥1-¥4. The lower prices can lure in players and cause them to accidentally spend a lot more money. The difference in price may not seem significant, but when you tally all of the balls that players go through in a typical game of pachinko, it really adds up.

There’s nothing wrong with playing a little pachinko here and there; hell, some people are actually about to make a living out of it. But just remember that a multi-trillion yen industry has spent decades designing machines to keep your butt planted squarely in front of a pachinko machine for as long as possible. Have fun!

Read more: The big business of Japan’s pachinko parlours, History of Pachinko

Bonus

Some lovely animated GIFs and wallpapers from our illustrator Aya. Enjoy!

Wallpaper (1280×800)
Wallpaper (2560×1440)

Animated GIF (700×438)
Animated GIF (1280×800)

When the Tofugu team was in Japan earlier this year, Japan’s safety measures (or lack thereof) astounded me. In the US, everything has to have a label and a warning, otherwise people will get hurt and sue the hell out of each other.

But that’s not the case in Japan. For whatever reason, Japanese culture isn’t as litigious as US culture. It means that Japanese people can get away with things that would be seen as grounds for a lawsuit in the US. Spigots with boiling hot water in kaitenzushi restaurants, sometimes-dangerous walkways, and—what struck me the most—train stations.

Many train platforms in Japan are open-air, meaning that trains whizz by, sometimes at high speeds, without any real barrier between people waiting on the platform and certain danger. I damn near jumped outta my skin the first time I heard a bullet train speed through a station.

Make no mistake, Japanese trains are remarkably safe. Considering how many people in Japan commute and travel by train every single day, the number of injuries and fatalities is extremely low. And the technology to keep people safe and comfortable in trains is evolving every year.

However, there are still problems. While we were in Japan we never saw anybody get hit by a train or fall onto the tracks or anything like that, but people in Japan are still killed and injured by trains all the time.

Safety Measures

Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and one way people end their lives is death by train. It happens all the time around the entire country. We even indirectly dealt with the issue while we were there: one of our trains in Tokyo was delayed by a suicide.

There are some mechanisms in place to deal with this at train stations: some have buttons you can press if somebody falls onto the tracks to alert the trains to stop, but most stations leave you pretty helpless.

Fortunately, the Japanese are working on keeping people safe on train tracks. Some cities have begun to add doors to train stops that open once the train arrives, and researchers are even working on station barriers that adjust to different train models.

Fixing the Root Cause

Of course, there are plenty of efforts to tackle the suicide problem to make sure that these barriers aren’t even needed in the first place.

Because Japan’s suicide rate has been extremely high for some 20+ years, people in the government and all over the country have taken efforts to solve this complex problem.

Of course, there’s no one solution to suicide just as there’s no one cause; the Japanese have funneled money into numerous programs including suicide hotlines, counseling, treatment, and public awareness campaigns to change cultural attitudes towards suicide.

Unfortunately, there’s still a long way to go before Japan’s suicide problem is anywhere close to fixed. But until this epidemic is stymied, a train remains a dangerous thing.

Bonus: Our illustrator extraordinaire Aya put together an animated gif of the illustration from today’s header, enjoy!

Growing up in a computerized world, I’ve never really thought too much about the problems faced by people using typewriters.

It’s pretty damn hard to make a Japanese typewriter (known in Japanese as a 和文タイプライター). Instead of the simple 26 letters in the English alphabet, Japanese has 48 hiragana, 48 katakana, and thousands and thousands of the Chinese-derived kanji characters.

Unsurprisingly, it’s really hard to come up with a typewriter that can incorporate 1,000+ characters, but people still tried their damndest to make it work.

In 1929, a man named Kyota Sugimoto invented the first Japanese typewriter and, in the decades that followed, many more people tried their hand at making a better Japanese typewriter.

They came in various shapes and sizes, but the underlying pricinple was more or less the same. You used a giant plate full of the 1,000+ characters included on the typewriter and gradually steered the plate to the character you wanted.

But it gets even more complicated. Some typewriters had interchangeable characters, some wrote vertically, others wrote horizontally. Apparently, certain characters, because of their complexity and the surface area, required more force than others. All in all, not very user friendly.

These typewriters might have given writing a certain formality and uniformity, but they were also basically slower than handwriting and really, really complicated.

Fortunately nowadays, Japanese people don’t have to deal with these cumbersome, complicated machines; computerized word processing has more or less solved the problem much more simply and elegantly than Japanese typewriters.

Still, there’s some mystique in these intricate devices. Even if they don’t make life especially convenient, they’re a fascinating relic of a time when Japanese was trying to bridge the gap into the modern world.

Read more: Gatunka – Japanese Typewriters

Quick, who’s the man who started the golden age of arcade video games? Who created gaming’s first killer app? Who created a new genre of games, and inspired the Mario-making Miyamoto and Konami’s Kojima? Do you give up, or did your eyes just skim ahead to the next sentence, inadvertently ruining the surprise? Tomohiro Nishikado is his name, and industry changing is his game. How’d he manage this achievement, this gold trophy of gaming? I’ll give you two dramatic, single word sentences. Space. Invaders.

The Early Years: Back in My Day, We Had Pong!

But let’s back up to the proverbial top of the screen. Tomohiro Nishikado graduated from Tokyo Denki University in 1968 with a degree in engineering. The following year, he joined up with Taito Corporation (known as Taito Trading Company at the time), and worked on the company’s electro-mechanical games, the precursor to arcade video games. By 1972 he was working on video games, starting with Elepong, a serious contender for the titles of both Japan’s First Video Game and Most Honest Pong Clone. Other early games include Davis Cup, a Pong-clone with four paddles, and Soccer, a Pong-clone with four paddles and a green background.

1974 saw the release of Speed Race, a personal favorite of Nishikado’s, which, after being licensed by Midway, went on to become the first Japanese game released in America. This relationship continued with Nishikado’s next game, Western Gun. When Midway released the game in America, it was adapted to use a microprocessor, a first for video games, giving it better graphics and smoother animation. Although preferring his original version, Nishikado was so impressed with the technological upgrade that he decided to use microprocessors for all of his future games.

Space: The Next Frontier

Next, we’ll fast forward, or for those using DVD, mash the next chapter button to 1977. Nishikado was inspired by the gameplay of Atari’s Breakout, but, realizing that Taito wouldn’t be making a Breakout clone until 1986’s Arkanoid, set out to make a game with a similar feel. He originally designed the game around shooting planes and tanks, but felt that moving sideways was decidedly un-plane-and-tank-like. Plus, Taito forbade him from using human targets, leaving him with pretty much nothing on Earth to use.

Luckily, Nishikado heard about an American movie coming out (a mostly unknown knock-off of Message From Space, that goes by the name of “Star Wars”), and decided on a sci-fi theme. The enemy aliens were based off of the invaders from War of the Worlds, which presumably means that at least one person has mistaken them for actual invading aliens. The foundation for one of the most influential games of all time had been laid. Nishikado called it Space Monsters. And then Taito renamed it Space Invaders.

I Accidentally an Entirely New Gameplay Concept

Unfortunately, the hardware running games at the time wasn’t quite up to par with the technology of the game’s sci-fi influences. Nishikado would have to create his own hardware for the game to run on, along with the tools to develop it. This would end up being the longest part of development, taking a grueling six months to complete. In contrast, the actual game only took three months to complete, making it one of those rare times when the easiest part of single-handedly creating an entire video game was single-handedly creating an entire video game.

Even with custom hardware, the game was too demanding. There were too many enemies on screen for the processor to handle, and they couldn’t move at the speed Nishikado wanted them to. But, while testing the game, he noticed that as the player destroys the enemies, they would speed up, as there were less of them for the processor to render. He decided to keep it that way, creating the concept of the difficulty curve that is now standard in nearly every game in existence. At any rate, Nishikado pressed on, and in 1978, Japan got their first taste of Space Invaders. And we all know how that went.

Poorly. It went poorly. The game flopped. At least, for the first three months, anyways. The success of Space Invaders began to turn around thanks to word of mouth, and possibly an 80’s training montage (it was ahead of its time, after all). People soon fell in love the little space crabs for the innovative gameplay and competitive value, being the first game that saved player’s high scores. By the end of the year, there were over 100,000 Space Invaders machines in Japan alone.

Space Sushi Crosses Pond, Invades People’s Hearts

In 1979, it was released in America, which was already in its second year of the video game crash of ’77, with the country burned out on years of Pong clones. The space crab invaders from Japan would turn out to be the industry’s saviors, and helped propel gaming into the mainstream. The game was so successful that the cost of buying a Space Invaders cabinet was offset within a month. The 1980 Atari 2600 release quadrupled the sales of the system, and the game, not content with being the first home console game to sell one million copies, would go on to sell over two million.

Space Invaders would go on to inspire the entire genre of shoot ’em ups, and is the game that got both Shigeru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima interested in making games. The video game that was inspired by Star Wars had become the Star Wars of video games.

But what happened to Nishikado? Well, not a whole lot, really. He continued working for Taito until 1996, when he left to form his own game company, Dreams. The company occasionally does development on Taito titles, and Nishikado oversaw development of Space Invaders Revolution for the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable. He was also credited in the most recent Space Invaders game, Space Invaders Infinity Gene, published by Square Enix, Taito’s current owner. Whatever he does, we’ll always remember him for his contribution that helped shape an industry. Who knows where it would be without him. Pong with six paddles?

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Sources:
http://www.arcade-history.com/?n=space-invaders&page=detail&id=2537
http://www.1up.com/features/ten-space-invaders
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2009/05/66479041/1#.UVZxjVcZsoL

Lots of people outside of Japan want to get their hands on Japanese music. Whether it’s Japanese learners who just want more passive learning materials, or just people who love Japanese music, it’s in high demand across the world.

The problem is that it can be really difficult to find Japanese music outside of Japan. It seems like most music retailers don’t want to have anything to do with any Asian music that’s not Gangnam Style.

So what do you do if you want to get Japanese music, but aren’t lucky enough to be living in Japan? Fortunately, you have more options than you think:

Brick-and-Mortar Stores

While more and more people shop online than ever before, there’s still a lot to be said about going to a physical storefront and shopping around there. Shopping in a brick-and-mortar store might be better for you if you don’t want to deal with shipping, if you want to casually browse in the store, or if there’s a store nearby to where you live.

If you live in a place that has a Japantown or some sort of Japanese community, then the easiest option might be to just go and check out whether or not any local stores sell Japanese music.

There are some Japanese book store chains, like Kinokuniya, that offer Japanese music in addition to books and magazines. If there aren’t any chain stores in your area, then there might small, mom-and-pop operations.

Even if they don’t carry the particular CD you’re looking for, it’s worth asking to see if you can order it through them. The store will have connections to sellers that you don’t, and you get the warm, fuzzy feeling of supporting a local business.

Vendors at Conventions

If you like to go to conventions, whether they’re for Japanese culture, anime, video games, or anything even tangentially related to Japan, chances are there will be a vendor somewhere there selling Japanese music CDs.

This isn’t a great option for a couple of reasons. These vendors are temporary, you won’t know what they’ll have until you get there, and these will have to basically be impulse purchases.

Even with all of those downsides, dealers are worth checking out if you’re already at a convention anyway.

Online

Some people don’t want to hit the bricks to go get Japanese music. They either want to live a hikikomori lifestyle and never leave their home, or they don’t want to bother with old-fashioned physical music formats like CDs. 21^st century, baby!

Fortunately, there are a lot of options for getting Japanese music online, whether it’s buying a CD online, downloading music, or streaming music.

iTunes

iTunes is one of the biggest music sellers in the world nowadays, and I’m sure it’s how a lot of you buy music. You can buy Japanese music through iTunes, but it can be kind of tricky.

Each country has its own, separate iTunes store; meaning that even if you have an iTunes account in your home country, you can’t access all of the music in the Japanese iTunes store without a bit of work.

You can create a Japanese iTunes account pretty easily, but the tricky part is the payment. The Japanese iTunes store requires you to pay with a Japanese credit card, which I’m guessing most of you don’t have.

Fortunately, people have discovered a few workarounds that have reliably worked for years now. The best option most people seem to use is to buy Japanese iTunes gift cards and use those in the place of a Japanese credit card.

There are sites out there (like Japan Codes) that deal exclusively in gift card codes, so you don’t even have to worry about importing an iTunes gift card from Japan.

Amazon

Ordering from Amazon Japan is forunately less convoluted than iTunes. You have to create a separate, Amazon Japan account, but you don’t need to use a Japanese credit card or anything like that. There’s even an option to see parts of the page in English!

The downside is that there’s no guarantee that they can ship to you. For that, there services that will ship anything to you (for a price). I’ll talk about those more later.

eBay

eBay’s long been a great way to get your hands on virtually anything you can think of, whether it’s a collectible lunchbox from a 70^s TV show, or an antique rug.

You can find Japanese music on eBay too, but not very reliably. Instead of a consistent selection, you’re pretty much at the whims of whatever sellers are on the site. Definitely a place to check out if you’re seeking out some specific piece of music, but not something to rely on too heavily.

Music Blogs

One of the best ways to get music online, Japanese or not, has always been through music blogs. What could be better than somebody who loves music and shares it with the world?

Getting music through music blogs can be a lot trickier than buying it. First of all, music blogs are generally very specific to that person’s music tastes. If you’re looking for Jpop on a Japanese metal blog, then you’ll be SOL.

Not only that, but there’s no real centralized directory that you can use to find a music blog that suits your tastes. Finding a music blog you love can be a really hit-or-miss process, but it’s all worth it when you find somebody who’s into all the same music as you.

Streaming

If you don’t want all of the hassle of buying, downloading, or shipping music, then streaming music online is a good option too. That way your delicate little netbook hard drive won’t fill up!

There are some streaming options out there for you. Grooveshark is a good, all-purpose streaming service that lets you stream a single song or a whole album for free.

Some sites, like Soundcloud let musicians upload individual songs for streaming and sometimes download, but fewer big-name musicians use it. Soundcloud is better for smaller acts, remixes, and DJ mixes.

Other services let you stream Japanese music, but with a little less control. Pandora has been a big name in music streaming for years, but the songs you listen to are chosen by an alogrithm; you get very little say in the process, especially if you don’t have a paid account.

Last.fm lets you have a little more choice. You can play certain, select songs for free and listen to radio like Pandora, but your choices are very limited. The main selling point of Last.fm is in the community and artist pages, which are very helpful for learning more about a musician and finding out about new artists.

Streaming services Spotify and Rdio have both announced that they will launch Japanese clients in the future, but as of right now, they’re rather lacking in Japanese music.

Export Sites

There are a ton of sites out that cater specifically to people who love Asian media and want to buy physical copies. They act as a middleman between you and . Sites like YesAsia or Play Asia export music, video games, movies and more.

Other sites are more general. You pay them a fee to track down a specific product in Japan, and they buy it and export it to you. We’ve written about Tenso before, but there other sites like DankeDanke and many more.

The downside to these sorts of sites is that you have to deal with shipping and handling, which can really add up. But if you want the real M^cCoy delivered directly to your door, it’s hard to do much better.

Japanese Sites

You can obviously go to Japanese sites to buy Japanese music, but they’re geared towards a Japanese audience. That means that not only are the websites usually in Japanese (which can be a problem for Japanese beginners), but they expect to ship domestically too.

The advantages to shopping on Japanese sites are that you cut out the middleman and you can find a broader and more current selection of music. Still, it wouldn’t be something I would recommend for most people.

Warning: Mileage May Vary

While you should have a pretty good rate of success with these methods, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for. There’s some music that’s rare, highly-sought after, old, or just plain hard to get a hold of. (I’ve been on the look out for a copy of Nujabes’s Metaphorical Music for years but have never been able to find one that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.)

The really tricky thing is that these methods might vary from place to place, region to region. Different countries have their own intellectual property laws and agreements with the various music conglomerates.

I don’t guarantee that all of these methods will work for everybody that reads this, or that they’re always entirely legal in your country. But I hope that this is a good jumping off point for people who’re looking to get some Japanese music.

Edit: Bonus Wallpapers!

Our wonderful illustrator Aya has been kind enough to make the header image for this post into desktop backgrounds. Enjoy!

1280 x 800, 1440 x 900, 1680 x 1050, 1920 x 1200

A while ago, Facebook added the ability to translate statuses and comments in foreign languages. Now, this definitely seems like a great idea in theory — you can make friends with people from all around the world and even if you don’t speak the same language as them, you’ll still be able to know what they’re saying on Facebook!

Unfortunately, online translations suck. We’ve covered before how online translators work, and why they’re notoriously awful; we’ve also seen how they can backfire if you don’t know what you’re doing.

So pretty much without exception, every Facebook translation I’ve seen of something in Japanese has been wrong. Or at least weird. It’s not really Facebook’s fault that machine translations are bad, but it’s their fault for implementing it and thinking it would work out.

I gathered up a bunch of translations from Japanese-speaking friends on Facebook that I thought were weird and funny. I apologize in advance to all of my Facebook friends for plundering their statuses, but I’ve blacked out their names for the sake of anonymity.

This translation isn’t actually all that awful, but for some reason Facebook thought it was necessary to translate the emoticon. I assume that “⌒” is some sort of mathematical or scientific symbol for “without,” but I’m not quite sure why Facebook translates it along with the Japanese.

One of my Facebook friends took a picture of an airplane with a bunch of Pokemon painted on it, and here were the comments:

The translation should look something like:

“Nice!”
“It almost looks like a plane version of those cars painted with anime characters, haha”

But instead, Facebook translates it to:

“A good?!”
“If you mistake one step’s flight based on versions of “itasha” w”

You can almost understand the meaning of the Facebook translation, but it still doesn’t make any sense.

Here’s a pretty straightforward interaction: somebody wishing another person a happy birthday. Here’s how it should be translated:

“Happy birthday! I haven’t seen you in a while, how’s your husband?”

Simple enough, but Facebook sees it as:

“Congratulations on your birthday and! I have not seen for some time, well my husband are you?”

The sentiment is there, but the grammar is f#@%ed.

Here, one of my Facebook friends is talking about how fast his new phone is.

It should be something like:

LTE feels about twice as fast as 3G . . . and on an iPhone 5, haha

But instead comes out as:

3 G LTE is more about twice about 7Mbps early. And from the iPhone5 w.

But I probably get the most joy out of when Facebook tries to translate emoticons, like on our status a few weeks ago about emoticons/emoji/kaomoji:

What’s really bizarre is when Facebook decides to translate the kaomoji, but not the actual Japanese.

Have you seen really bad Facebook translations before? Screencap and share ‘em with us in the comments!

Header photo by Robert Scoble

Nowadays, free Japanese dictionaries are everywhere; you no longer have to pay an arm and a leg to buy a giant Japanese dictionary, but instead you can just look up things for free with a website, app, or browser extension.

But what a lot of people don’t know is that more often than not, these free dictionaries are labors of love. Very dedicated people build and maintain these dictionaries in their spare time, sacrificing a lot of time (and usually money) to keep them up and running.

I wanted to hear more about what it’s like to build and run one of these dictionaries, so I took some time to talk to Gregory Bober, the creator of one of my favorite Japanese dictionaries, Tangorin. We talked about Tangorin’s latest update, how Tangorin came about, where it’s going, and what’s wrong with Japanese dictionaries today.

Tell us a little about yourself — what’s your name, where are you from, etc..
My name is Grzegorz (Gregory) Bober. I’m 26 and I’m from Poland. I’m a web developer working mostly on personal projects.

How did you get interested in learning Japanese in the first place?
I’ve always been a huge film buff. In my early teens I got interested in anime. I discovered a whole different film universe and wanted to watch and understand everything in it.

I had a chance to learn English very early on so I got to enjoy movies on a whole new level. I never liked Polish cinema, there’s really not much to like, and once you get a taste of a really good American film, understand it without subtitles, and with cultural references, there’s no going back.

With anime, I was stuck with subtitles, and that bothered me a lot since I knew very well how much I was missing out. That’s why I started learning Japanese. Simply to watch anime without subtitles.

Did you teach yourself Japanese, or did you learn in a class?
Luckily there was a small foreign language school in my home town that offered a course in Japanese language, culture, and calligraphy. I went there during high school. Then I got accepted to the Japanology department at the University of Warsaw. It was a very intense course in everything related to Japan, with a strong focus on language. Knowing kana, basic kanji, basics of grammar and having watched a lot of anime helped me tremendously.

I was a pretty good student at first, but since I’m very lazy and get bored easily I got progressively bad. The fact that we started to spend too much time on classical Japanese and Buddhism didn’t help either. Learning Buddhist mantras by heart and deciphering Heian-jidai love letters from princes to every women in the imperial court while still not being able to have a proper conversation, seemed pointless, I lost interest and decided to drop out.

I never saw myself as a translator or a language teacher so there was no point in staying. I wrote my thesis about the influences of Western culture in the works of Shinichiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo), my professor liked it, but I never got my degree.

After so many years of studying, my Japanese still isn’t that great, but don’t worry, I don’t actually translate anything at Tangorin.

Have you ever traveled to or lived in Japan?
After I dropped out of university I spent a little over a year traveling, mostly in East and Southeast Asia. I stayed in Tokyo for six months. I lived in a long-term guest house in Nishi-Funabashi.

I’m not a huge fan of sightseeing, I prefer to stay in one place, live as local as possible and wait until I get to know my surroundings really well so that’s exactly what I did. I got out of Tokyo only once, to climb Mt. Fuji. Most of the time I spent with friends in Shibuya, Akihabara, Shinjuku, Harajuku, and Roppongi (in that order).

My Japanese was good enough to live there comfortably without any English. I had to leave because my two visas had run out and it’s not that easy to stay in Japan as a freelance developer without a degree. I definitely want to go back.

What is Tangorin? What does the name “Tangorin” mean?
Tangorin is essentially an online interface to various open projects built for Japanese language students. My job is to normalize data from several dictionary files, mostly from Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC, combine them into a single fast and easy-to-search database, and provide some basic additional features like custom vocabulary lists.

As for the name, I wanted something short and simple that sounded Japanese but was easy to pronounce and spell in Western languages. 単語 (tango) means “words,” 林 (rin) is a common suffix for dictionaries. I liked how it kind of sounded like tangerine. And that it was a very unpopular word on Google.

What new features are you adding to Tangorin?
The biggest change in the newest update will be a whole new interface based on Twitter Bootstrap. The main layout won’t change much but it will be more consistent and mobile friendly. Much faster too, performance- and bandwidth-wise. The most important thing is that it will help me make more updates on a more regular basis.

The wildcards functionality will be back (it was a terrible mistake to sacrifice them for database performance, sorry for that), few new features in Vocabulary, and improved search results sorting. Shortly after the update I will add a look-up method based on the Wikipedia API. It will translate article names into selected languages.

When did you decide to make Tangorin?
While studying at the university I realized there was no good online Japanese dictionary. There was of course WWWJDIC, Hideki (no longer exists), jisho.org, and few others, but apart from WWWJDIC they were all based on EDICT (and still are).

EDICT is basically a legacy database format for the newer much better structured JMdict. The main difference between these two formats is that a single entry in JMdict contains all the synonyms, alternative kanji writings and readings associated with the Japanese term it describes, whereas in EDICT they are divided into multiple reading-writing pairs with copied English definition.

I was also disappointed with the overall functionality of available dictionaries, how they weren’t properly linked together and lacked useful features like creating your own vocabulary lists. I made a simple interface for JMdict for personal use and then made it public under tangorin.com. Soon, most of my friends from Japanology started using it and they’ve been very helpful with its development.

What are your long-term goals for Tangorin?
First of all, to make it profitable. Right now running Tangorin costs me a lot of time and money. I really enjoy working on it and want to spend more time developing it. There’s a lot of room for improvement. Donations have been scarce but I don’t want to clutter the layout with more ads or limit Tangorin’s free functionality to offer features for a fee. I still need to figure this out. There’s a strong demand for a mobile app, especially on Android, so that’s definitely on my to do list.

Apart from that: autosuggest, incorporating Japanese WordNet to build a synonyms dictionary, hand-writing recognition, a simple morphological analyzer built with MeCab, kanji decomposition, a built-in spaced repetition system to effectively study words from Tangorin vocabulary lists, better forums, REST API, pronunciation, audio files.

I also plan on releasing a normalized, JSON version of all the WWWJDIC, Tatoeba, and KanjiVG data that Tangorin is based on.

How do you try to make Tangorin stand out?
By focusing on developing a clear, fast and easy to use search experience. By combining different look up methods so that you can search with Japanese, English, kana, romaji, kanji, and/or tags from a single input form.

So many Japanese dictionaries nowadays rely on Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC — do you think this is a good or a bad thing?
Definitely a bad thing. The fact that many dictionaries still use EDICT instead of JMdict makes it even worse. WWWJDIC is a fantastic project and the quality of its translations is pretty good. Any kind of alternative, especially for more experienced students, would be great.

We also need better example sentences.

I would love to license Kenkyusha’s database, both English-Japanese and Japanese-Japanese dictionaries, but I don’t have the resources to do that. Perhaps when Tangorin Android and iOS apps are finished.

Do you have any other projects you’re working on right now?
I have other small projects and ideas to work on but right now I’m focused only on Tangorin. It’s been five years since I started developing it and I feel like a lot more could be done in that time.

Thanks to Gregory Bober for the interview! You can check out Tangorin here.