Japanese web round-up 15-3-08
Mar 15th, 2008 by Ad Blankestijn
Translator’s Tools is a new blog by Gururaj Rao that conveniently introduces tools to make translation from and to the Japanese easier. In his most recent post, he introduces the Glova Bilingual Database, a contextual database/dictionary that will not only be of help to translators, but to anyone studying Japanese.
Asiajin is a blog on webservices and technology and in a intriguing post it comments on a Japanese company marketing tombstones with QR Code (the Japanese 2D barcode for cellphones). Via the barcode, visitors can access photo’s and other memorabilia of the deceased on their cellphone. Weird? It shows how ordinary those handy barcodes have become in Japan, although the US and Europe are still lagging far behind.
[Imagine all those graves with QR Codes for all eternity... Photo Ad Blankestijn]
Neojaponisme has an in-depth review by Matt Treyvaud on Chichi to Ran (”Breast and Eggs”), the novel by Kawakami Mieko that won the 138th Akutagawa prize last month. This stream of consciousness novel written in the Osaka dialect tells about the “crisis in the relationship between Makiko, an Osaka hostess and single mother in her late thirties, and Midoriko, her 12- or 13-year-old daughter.”
Like the Buddhist and Daoist philosophers of the past, Bob Brady of PureLandMountain.com is living on a mountainside in Shiga, high above Lake Biwa. He writes beautifully about nature surrounding him, as in this recent post about the coming of spring called The Big Show.
JON of As I See It is reading Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (a title that rings a bell in my mind, I must have read it too sometime in the past) and cites a memorable phrase from that book of practical wisdom:
It is impossible to organize things if you yourself are not in order. When you do things the right way, at the right time, everything else will be organized. You are the boss. When the boss is sleeping, everyone is sleeping. When the boss does something right, everyone will do everything right, at the right time. That is the secret of Buddhism.
