AltJapan

Localize It

                  

Local heroes take Japanese video games to the world (Japan Times)

Although it's sad (but true) this article begins with the words "Japan may not be the all-conquering video-game powerhouse it once was," it's a nice profile of both my company, AltJapan Co., Ltd., and several other localization industry players. Thanks to the Japan Times for the coverage!

I don't talk much about games here because I like to at least try and keep my professional and personal lives separate, but it's hard to believe its been well over a decade since Hiroko and I started translating video games professionally. Today "localization" is a buzzword. It's a given that video games need to be carefully translated and re-written to match their local audiences. I run into young college grads who enthuse about getting into it as a career all the time.

But just ten years back, you could practically count the number of people who even knew what the word "localization" meant on two hands. Only a handful of people actually specialized in it full-time. It was a sort of Wild West, with everyone from producers to freelancers making the rules and conventions up as they went along. The luckiest worked in-house at big game companies; my college buddy Alex Smith was one, and his tales of work at Squaresoft (now Square-Enix) inspired me to get off my duff at the Patent and Trademark Office, where I was working as a technical translator, and take the plunge into games.

Hiroko and I finally got our chance in 1998, introduced to a client by mutual friend and anime-translation legend Michael House. It was a cult-hit platformer ("platform game" being the term for Super Mario-style side-scrolling action game) by the name of Silhouette Mirage, published in the US by the late, lamented Working Designs. (This link represents the first time I've ever actually laid eyes on the finished product!)

Hiroko and I were living in Washington DC at the time, and actually printed out the code on the trusty old dot matrix printer, wrote out translations in longhand while eating at the local pizza parlor, and then inputted the English back into the master file back at home. Today, Excel is pretty much the industry standard for localization files, and you go for pizza after you're done working for the day. How times change.

We'd go on to work on Lunar: Silver Star Story for WD and then a whole host of other titles for various agencies before deciding to found our own company. We hired an attorney to file the paperwork, commissioned a logo from my pal Alen Yen, and printed up business cards. That was back in 2001. Talk about a Space Odyssey of sorts.

Status: It's Lolicomplicated

I Don't Wanna Grow Up, 'Cause Maybe if I Did... I'd Have to Date 3D Women Instead of 2D Kids (Neojaponisme)

As someone who spent the Eighties obsessing over animated robots instead of girls, researching this article for David Marx's Neojaponisme took me into some very strange waters. One of the very strangest involves a "lolicon" pioneer by the name of Aki Uchiyama.

Roundup

Sorry for the lack of posting of late. Looking back, the last three months feel like a hole in our personal histories. All of the time that got sucked into dealing with the triple crises up north... What would we be doing right now, had this never happened? (In my case, probably sitting in front of the computer like usual...)

Anyway, some recent articles rounded up from various sites online.

Up top, you can see a pair of tanuki spotted deep in the forest beyond Mt. Takao. Hiroko and I have taken up trail running, which involves jogging up the peaks instead of walking them. She did an article about it for CNNGo.

And speaking of CNNGo, here's an editorial I did about smoking in Japan.

And finally, I wrote this article about Japan's forgotten first astronaut for Neojaponisme. 

(Does anybody actually tune in to blogs for updates anymore? It seems like all the action's on Twitter these days.)

Za Burakku Hooru

Buckle your seatbelts for a ride through space-time to the mind-blowing depths of the...

These scans are from a three decade old movie pamphlet for the 1980 Disney SFxtravaganza "The Black Hole." It seems almost quaint by American standards, but even today you can still purchase movie pamphlets for films at the concession stands of Japanese theaters. In addition to the usual photo stills and actor bios, many include original content such as essays from film critics or genre experts. They've lost some of their meaning in the era of the always-on Internet connection. But back in the day, these slick little mini-magazines represented prime hunting ground in the never-ending otaku quest for trivia.

The Black Hole's pamphlet is a classic example of the artform. Famed Gunpla box-art illustrator Yuji Kaida was hired to create a series of beautiful, hand-drawn cutaway illustrations of the Cygnus, V.I.N.cent, and Maximilian. They're complemented by obsessively detailed run-downs of their inner workings and even equations describing every aspect of their fictional existences. You were undoubtedly dying to know that both V.I.N.cent and Maximilian possess 64-bit computers with a whopping three gigabytes of memory each -- which probably isn't even sufficient space to store the Blu-ray edition of the film.

Thanks to Roger H. for giving me the pamphlet, way back when!

Kappa vs. Toad

A kappa wrestles a toad atop a pumpkin in this netsuke Hiroko and I found several years back. Provenance unknown. The faces look startlingly modern-anime-esque, but then again, Japanese artists have been toying with the building blocks of "kawaii" design for centuries.

OtakuVerse Zero Redux

For those who missed it last time around because of region restrictions, my "special friend" Patrick has helpfully uploaded the latest version of his OtakuVerse Zero show on YouTube. Let's.... CHECK IT OUT!