Letters

You'll make a girl who admires you to no end very happy if you write a Next Exit column on Cooking or Food related anime sites *big, dazzling, cheesy smile* I've been obsessing lately with, not Clamp (I detest it), not cutsey little animals or bishonens, but "Shota's Sushi", a manga/anime/drama (???) about a boy who went away from home to Tokyo to become world's best sushi chef. It's pleasantly addictive, inspiring me to butcher poor fishes, slice the meat off them and savor them with soy sause and wasabi. They're so educational, and it makes my mouth waters. Please? Someday?

Curtain Smoker juuchan@yahoo.com

That's a neat idea, to be sure, but honestly, are there enough cooking and food-related anime and manga to make a column? Remember, there need to be sites for me to browse. Of course, if I included every anime in which a female character has either notably good or bad cooking skills, I could cover most anime out there...

The question of sub versus dub is a tricky one, and I find myself sympathizing with both sides of the fence. On the one hand, I suspect that many fans who complain about dubs (and especially the accuracy of translations) are parroting what they hear from all of their friends and not only haven't seen a large enough sampling of dubs to form an educated opinion, but also don't know any Japanese other than the random bits of vocabulary that any anime fan picks up. They complain about the American voice actors because they don't understand enough Japanese and don't have enough experience with hearing and understanding the language to even be able to tell when the original Japanese seiyuu was crappy, too.

And then there's my personal opinion: by and large, I hate dubs. Not because they're dubs per se, but simply because most of them really *are* of deplorable quality and questionable faithfulness to the original. However, there *are* a significant number of dubs which are of very good quality, and ironically some of them--such as El Hazard, Cowboy Bebop, and Fatal Fury--I actually prefer over the original Japanese version. There are a wealth of non-Japanese voice actors out there who have amazing talent and genuinely put their hearts into the roles they play, and studios are starting to wake up to the fact that they can't just churn out crap and expect their most loyal fan base to scoop it up by the bucketful. Having said my peace, I'll leave the sub/dub debate for another day.

Even in a perfect translation effort, there are inevitably going to be some things that the uneducated fan is going to cry foul on. When I knew just enough Japanese to be dangerous, I used to watch subtitled anime and bitch about every little word that I caught that wasn't accurately reflected in the translation. My particular pet peeve was the use of profanity when I couldn't clearly tell that the character was swearing (I later learned that most profanity as we know it really doesn't exist in Japanese, but that's another subject). As time passed and I gained more fluency, I realized that you really *can't* translate "ittekimasu" or "baka" the same way every time, and that sometimes profanity in English is necessary in order to faithfully convey certain pronouns and politeness levels. You *must* use your imagination in order to produce a script that is both faithful to the original and interesting to watch--there's simply no getting around it.

So the bottom line is... next time you hear someone complaining about the veracity of a given anime's translation, ask them just how they know. If their answer falls along the lines of "my friend who knows Japanese said so", or "it's well-known", don't give their whining too much credit. If they think the translations are inaccurate, or you can't stand not knowing, then they should go learn Japanese. It's not difficult, it's just very different than English. If they're not willing to put in the time and effort to seriously study the language, that's their choice, but they shouldn't be bitching about something that they know nothing about.

Some recommended links:
    http://www.maktos.com
The Japanese is Possible section here is a great start. It makes the language very accessible.
    http://www.egroups.com/group/jpnforum/
    http://www.egroups.com/group/manga-translate/
The former is an excellent ML for general questions about Japanese language and Culture. The latter is for assistance with amateur manga translation. Both are run by Brian Dunn, an American who is quite fluent in the language, and there are many Japanese people on the lists.
    http://ayashi.net/honyaku.shtml
My personal philosophy on translation in a slightly more condensed form than this email.

----
Nekojita =v= nekojita@ayashi.net
Ayashi no Ceres Translation Project =v= http://ayashi.net
----

I want to apologize to "Nekojita" for chopping his (or her?) letter nearly in half, but as it was written, it was simply far too long to print.

As I said in an email exchange, I had only one quibble. The art of dubbing has come so far in the past five years that it's hard for me to take seriously anyone who still insists "most dubs are bad". It's been my experience recently that most dubs are now acceptable to good, and that it's pretty easy to avoid the bad ones (cough, CPM).

I've been reading Last Exit for a while now and wanted to say I've been enjoying the column. However, I've been having a problem with a lot of the pages on the Pike (and anime pages in general) lately. Webmasters seem to be extremely careless in throwing around spoilers for a series. Twice today when browsing through Cowboy Bebop pages I almost read Spike Spiegal's very spoiler-ish backstory before frantically hitting the back button on my browser for all it was worth. This has happened to me with a lot of other series as well: I find spoilers without meaning to. I once ran into an Utena page that gave away the ending on the main page, and something similar happened to me with a couple of major Fushigi Yuugi plot points.

I understand that most sites probably aren't going to try to hide the identity of the main Sailor Senshi, but why do so many feel the need to blurt out major spoilers without any kind of a warning? Would it really take so much effort to mention that certain sections contain spoilers or to not put major spoilers on the main page? Lately I've given up looking at web pages at all until I've seen the entire series, because I really don't want to be spoiled.

Becca Schlichtig/Miaka
Miaka1164@aol.com

Honestly, not visiting sites for an anime until you've seen it all is the only way to avoid being spoiled. You're right, site authors should attempt to hide spoilers. But they don't, and since this is nothing new, I don't see it ending any time soon. Curious that you should mention Cowboy Bebop, though, as I saw no spoilers for the ending when I browsed those sites a while back. Of course, it's possible they hadn't yet seen the ending...

You can almost see the inherent pointy-hairedness in network decisions to broadcast anime, can't you? For the executives listening, a simple word of advice: If you're going to broadcast anime for kids, be they shoujo or shounen or both, make sure that the shows you broadcast are the ones ORIENTED towards kids, be they shoujo or shounen or both. Don't snap up anime that you might think is too deep or heavy or not-hitting-the-right-demographic or family-watchdog-unfriendly and hack it up to pieces, just stick with stuff like Pokemon or something. This way, less money will go into editing and you'll probably find yourself with better ratings for that show. If you want to show some of those heavier series, slot them accordingly: Not Saturday morning, but maybe Saturday evening or night when all the kiddies are in bed and the otaku teenage audience is on the prowl. Maybe get your parent company to license it for their cable daughter affiliate so that it doesn't have to stand to the pressure that network corporations have. (This doesn't neccessarily apply to just anime, either--who here watched Mallrats when it was broadcast on ABC prime-time?)

Look at Gundam Wing, for example--this is probably the best TV anime I've seen yet (this is where all the DBZ fans dogpile on me ^_^;): They have the edited (although only mildly for violence and language, I think) version on in the afternoons on Toonami for the kids, and the unedited version broadcast during the Midnight Run, for all those older people who prefer their stuff uncut. I don't know how successful it was, but I DO know that it gained a faithful audience on my college campus. Keep in mind that some of these people had not (until then) seen any anime outside the older 80's stuff like Voltron. That makes it successful in my eyes, at least...

Lawrence Chu lawrence@sandwich.net http://pomi.sandwich.net/

One thing that wasn't mentioned this column that's worth noting (Sumimasen if it was commented on last column) is how Fox Kids is how hypocritical they are with their edits; in Digimon, they aren't allowed to even make references to things dying, yet in Beast Wars, characters are regularly killed off (and usually stay that way!). Cyber 6's secret identity is a man, and she has a problem with one of the female students in "Adrian's" class hitting on her, yet far tamer situations and innuendos are edited out of anime.

Until one of the networks gets brave enough to try airing an anime series at a normal hour aimed at the appropriate age group (and advertised towards such), I fear there isn't much hope for anything resembling your utopia on TV. It's a pity, since the very attitudes on anime of the few networks that air it in the US are the reason most people who don't know much about anime believe it to be either pure kid's shows or blood, gore, and hentai, with very little middle ground.

-"Atolm2000"
atolm2000@hotmail.com

I thought the main reason why Escaflowne didn't get good ratings off Fox Kids lineup was because it aired at the same time as Batman Beyond - a solid cartoon series with a significant amount of fan following. There's really no telling how much "good" the editing may have inflicted on the ratings, aside from turning away hardcore fans.

ttyl

Jeffy rotinoma@animefan.org

Good point. Still, I find it extremely hard to believe that Fox Kids could have built up much of an audience when they skipped the first episode. Kids aren't as dumb as the networks would believe. They can tell when they aren't seeing the story from the beginning.

I felt like saying something about the online piracy of anime. In fact, I am one of those evil people who collect encoded anime and sometimes help distribute them. This is probably due to the college dorm experience, where everyone has a fast ethernet connection and live in a collective orgy of file sharing of illegal software, movies, mp3s, games, and anything else that can be transmitted over a network. Once having been exposed to the idea that everything digital can be obtained freely, its difficult to go back to paying for everything again. This is also worsened by the increasing quality of the encoded anime that is being distributed. Just a few years ago, the only things available were low quality vivo and real media files, but now, people are enocding files in asf, divx, mpeg, mpeg2 and various other high quality formats. In truth, I'm in love with this, as I finally get to see rare anime in a fairly decent format that I would never have seen otherwise, and that I can share easily with my friends. On the bad side, I can see high quality anime without paying for it. In my selfish opinion, i think, "hey, its free, yay for me" even though this hurts the anime industry.

However, even though this may seem like a weak argument supporting it, it seems that there is a much larger interest in anime over these couple of years, which, in my own opinion, was helped by the illegal distribution. (of course, pokemon helped too). Before I had found anime episodes online, I was just mildly interested in it, willing to watch a 3rd generation tape when I could get a hold of it, but not really putting any investment into it. Nowadays, I spend tons of time on the web, checking out websites to my favorite animeseries, downloading wallpapers, icons, and winamp skins, and getting more information on them. I find myself buying anime-related items such as posters and trading cards and anime gifts for friends. Hopefully, if I get a decent job this summer, I will have enough money to housing to actually buy either the ADV Nadesico tapes, or maybe even a DVD player and the DVD version. Other people I know who also trade encoded anime have also started buying the anime DVDs after finding out how much they enjoyed the encoded version and want to own a better version (but others are cheap bastards like me who haven't paid a dime for a tape or DVD yet).

Well, I guess the increased interest argument is a weak rationalization argument on my part at best, but seriously, I do believe it helps fuel interest in anime in general by making it more easily accessible (cheaper and more convenient).

I know that overall, I am wrong and that the piracy of anime is illegal, but who can resist the lure of free anime that you can easily share with friends?

In any case, I was wondering about your opinion on the advent of digital fansubbing. Did you take a look at the Love Hina and Hand Maid May DIVX eps floating around the web, Hotline, and IRC? They were subbed digitally just skant days after the airing in Japan. In a sense, this form of fansubbing is just as legitamate as tape fansubs, since no company has officially picked them up yet, but they are more easily spread to anyone with an internet connection than the fansubs. In fact, the Love Hina eps are so prevalent, when surfing the web for some more info on the series, I kept on getting numerous sites to download the episodes from, and finding only one decent summary, character information site on it!

Jeff jeffyu80@hotmail.com

Digital distribution. What's my opinion? It all depends on what you're using it for. Are you using it to gain access to obscure anime that most agree has little chance to be picked up for distribution in the US? If so, more power to you. But if you're doing it just to avoid dropping twenty-five bucks on a video, then that's stealing.

As far as digital fansubbing goes, I'm cool with it, as long as we're talking about watching anime on a little window on your computer desktop. If this gets to the point where you can download the fansub, burn it onto a DVD and play it on your TV (and it will get to that point), I would consider that a "bad thing".

Remember, the dark side of this digital distribution thing is already happening. People are "ripping" the contents of American anime DVDs and putting them up for distribution on pirate sites. As long as this stays underground, the anime companies are safe. But one day, there is likely to be a DVD-ROM burner in every new PC, just as nearly every new PC has a CD-R burner today. I'm sure ADV, Pioneer, and the rest are not looking forward to the day when any schmoe with a PC and an Internet connection can make a perfect digital copy of their product.

By the way, I'd really appreciate it if someone could explain to me what the heck is this "DIVX" format that everyone's talking about. The last "DIVX" I remember was a crap pay-per-view video format. I thought DIVX was simply DVD's MPEG2 format, encoded so non-DIVX players can't read it.