I think it's a play on the Japanese phenome "don", which means "stupid" or "blunt." (ex. "donkusai" - stupid, retarded; "donki" - blunt instrument.)
KLOV has more details, as well as a slightly sketchier rumour that the original title was intended to be "Monkey Kong", but a blurry fax caused the finished cabinet art to be titled "Donkey Kong".
There is one other major audience: mothers who want to quiet their kids about getting a Dra-Que (Dragon Quest) game, but who don't want their kids to have a system. Once the system is installed, the kids can resort to the "we have a system but no games" argument.
Incidentally, these direct-plug games are fairly popular in Japan, (they gotta come from somewhere!) especially sports and karaoke games.
Sure, we know that only female mosquitoes can bite. This sort of elementary-school knowledge is easily suspended, compared to the storytelling requirement of having an anonymous male lead in a Japanese game that has most of its scenes in either the bedroom or bathroom?
It's not too strange to see video games making a break into Japanese drugstores, they've been in convenience stores for years now.
- Cracking a dictionary will reveal hundreds of "ha" kanji, but most of them aren't commonly used. In fact, there are only 2,000 kanji commonly used in newspaper level Japanese.
- There is one critical difference between cell and land lines -- you must buy the land line from the telco (or someone else), which can cost near $1000 USD. With a keitai you only need to buy the phone, which will cost less than $100 if you're happy with last year's model. Of course, you can sell the line after, but if you're moving around a lot, it's a lot simpler to just own the cell phone.
- Cell internet is expensive by volume, (ie. web page / porn viewing) but for what is effectively a continuously connected e-mail client that you can put in your pocket, it is very cheap. Spam has been very problematic, especially with Docomo, unless you happened to have an underbar in your name. Recently, you can also use unused talk time to pay for packet use.
- Work and school hours in Japan tend to be longer. (American workers still work more paid hours, though.) There is also the tradition for the "salaryman" to loiter on his way home. Most grade-school students will be at school until at least 5:00 and often attend cram schools after. Thus the home computer is not so accessible compared to American settings. The default action for "idle time" (waiting for bus, eating McDonald's...) is to whip out your keitai and do your mails. It's that much more convenient to have them all there.
- Most younger people that I know rely on their cell phones to organize any sort of social gathering. Two of them will run into each other, and then all call / mail other people. Of course, it is still possible to function without one, but like any convenience, it becomes increasingly inconvenient to not use it as it gains popularity.
- Good point about etiquette -- many people think that cell phones are slowly destroying the morals of young Japanese use as surely as TV did to the last generation.
Typing Speed in Perspective
on
One-Thumb Keyboard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Typing speed for "keitai" or ultraportable devices (specifically cell phones) in Japan compares surprisingly well with desktop computing.
The main reason is that... big surprise here now... most of the typing is done in the Japanese language, and not in English. In order to type in Japanese on a QWERTY or other roman-set board, you must generally hit at least two keys per character. So hitting the same phone button two or three times (on average) to produce a character is actually faster than hunting down two separate keys and pushing them in sequence.
Furthermore, just typing the characters in doesn't mean that you're finished. You must use the "henkan" (character transformation) system. Japanese has many ways to write the same character -- for example, there are over 40 different characters for "ha". Sounds like a nightmare, but henkan systems analyze the grammatical functions of the surrounding characters to automatically generate the most likely intended output. The user must then manually touch up any discrepancies. (In related news, the henkan system is being blamed for destroying the writing ability of young Japanese people.)
With this additional overhead, raw keystrokes aren't necessarily the biggest factor in Japanese typing speed. Further, modern keitais make use of auto-completion based on words commonly entered by the user. Reports of speeds over 200 wpm aren't unbelievable when a user can enter many words with only two or three buttons! Incidentally, the average word size in Japanese is two kanji or 4 kana characters.
There is also Japan's miserable history of IT education to consider. A good friend of mine graduated from a pre-business program at her high school which included certification in computing and word processing. She can barely copy and paste. Most of their certification was on "wa-puro" or big word-processing typewriters. Until about 10 years ago, these were the staple in most offices.
Most Japanese people in their mid-20s were introduced to their own cell phone before they had even laid hands on a real computer! To many Japanese people, their keitai is their most personal and important posession. It's only to be expected that we should see advancements here affecting other technologies.
A few other points of interest:
- Japanese people are at home (and able to use their own PC) less than people in most other countries.
- Cell phones can be cheaper than using land-line phones or public phones in Japan... especially when everyone else only uses cell phones!
- Cellular internet, which charges per packet instead of by time, is much more economical for e-mail than dial-up.
- The disaster that is Japanese urban planning, and continuously changing work and social schedules make cell phones a social necessity.
Re:Rebuilding? Like we rebuilt Guatemala? Iran?
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Japan and Germany succeeded in becoming democracies was because they had no natural resources for post-war American companies to exploit. Hence there was no need for the U.S. to go in and "intervene". BTW, those same democracies appose our unilateral attack on Iraq.
No, Japan does not oppose your unilateral attack on Iraq. The Japanese people (well, about 80% of them) oppose your war. The Japanese government has already bowed, as they know that without the US policy that "an attack on Japan is an attack on the US" North Korea would nuke them in seven minutes.
Here are some recent press quotes from the Japanese Prime Minster, Mr. Jun'ichirou Koizumi.
"At this time... I understand, and I support the start of the use of force by the United States."
"We do not know when there will be a threat against Japan. America has said clearly that any attack on Japan is an attack on the United States.... The Japanese people must not forget that this provides a strong deterrent against an attack on Japan."
In Japan, we actually have a "sound" that is made by a completely silent situation. It goes like this:
"
shiin..." (Sounds like the English word "sheen".)
No kidding.
There are some theories about the origin. The most believeable is that it was originally worded to match the "white noise" that your body creates itself in the absence of other sound. You can hear it if you listen carefully enough. (Or if you have tinnitis.)
From my understanding of the article, what we have is a karaoke version of Max Smart's Hall of Hush?
Dell's low price point doesn't come from bulk discounts. Any major PC manufacturer gets these. What makes them cheaper than, say, IBM or Sony is:
Very limited research budget - Dell doesn't waste money inventing new technology when they can just "borrow" it.
Very effective inventory control - They normally have no more than a day's parts on hand and thus no need for warehouses.
Manufacture to order - Each PC is ordered before it is built, thus there is no risk from advance manufacturing.
Direct Sales - No shops and no need to store manufactured systems.
I seem to remember Dell making press releases about shipping systems with Linux, but their store page is currently down with technical difficulties so I can't take a look. I'll consider the fact that their "Technical Difficulty Encountered" page says how they use Genuine Microsoft (R) Windows (tm) to be a bad sign.
One last note -- the quality of used books is often so good that they can't be told apart from new. I have seen unethical comic shops (in Canada and the United States) which will sell shrink-wrapped used books bought in bulk (at about $1.50 - $2.50 each) through furuhon-ya as new imports for more than $10. These are the same sort of shops that will sell a $8 Son May CD as a $40 "Japanese Import".
You can often detect used books by opening the very last page and looking at the dust cover. This is where furuhon-ya affix the price tags. Sometimes you can see the outline of the tag or residual glue. Or, in the case of a really stupid comic shop owner, the original tag itself. I once went to a shop that had a rack of manga at the "bargain" price of $8... every one of them had a Book Off sticker still stuck to the inside of the dust jacket.
NOT THAT IT REALLY FREAKING MATTERS! Just goes to show my American collector mentality. The content is the same, right? If some guy can find a way to provide it to you at a lower overhead, he gets the profits.
Regarding rentals, I meant that video game rentals are prohibited in Japan (I have no idea why.) Music and video rentals are about the same as western standards. Furuhon-ya sell used books, manga, videos, music, and video games, but the only industry which seems to have attempted to shut them down is the video game industry.
The additional Japanese alphabets do not make Japanese more complicated. In fact, the kana systems (hiragana and katakana) were originally introduced to allow lower classes and women (at the time considered academically incapable of using Chinese characters) to read and write.
Reading and writing of hiragana and katakana in modern Japanese is much easier than English. Although there are slightly more (about double) the number of characters than in the roman alphabet, each character represents a single syllable, and only that syllable, with very, very few exceptions.
Thus knowing the pronunciation of the word means knowing how to write it in kana. Knowing how to read the characters means automatically knowing the pronunciation. Compare that to English where the same group of characters can have many different pronunciations. (Example: through, bough, trough, rough, cough)
Manga are not written at any level lower than other books targetted at the same audience. Of course, manga targetted at small children will omit or provide the pronunciation for difficult kanji. But so do storybooks and school textbooks.
And although manga tends to have less words than a novel, many manga series span thousands of pages and involve highly complicated story lines and character relationships. Although they can be considered "lighter" reading material page-for-page, it would generally be impossible for an illiterate person to enjoy manga above the kiddie/toilet humour or pornographic levels. Trust me, I've tried.
The problem is that the more high-brow the text, the more likely it is to be written in kanji. Kanji is a one-symbol-is-one-word system. You have to have a bloody large vocabulary to make any sense of it.
Firstly, Chinese characters (hanzi) do not represent words, they represent morphemes. For example, no single character can represent tense, inflection, or plurality. Secondly, Japanese kanji are not the Chinese alphabet, as the writer above suggests. Although originally introduced by the Chinese, modern kanji has far fewer characters than the Chinese alphabet. There are also many "kokuji", kanji characters made in Japan which do not exist in Chinese writing.
Except for ancient Japanese works and Chinese poems, no Japanese text is ever written entirely in kanji. (The only exception would be very short phrases like "no tresspassing" on a sign.) In fact, it is impossible to write a verb or adjective in modern Japanese without using one of the kana systems.
Using obscure kanji certainly makes a work more literary and "high-brow", much in the same way that using obscure vocabulary makes an English passage more academic. However, these characters are out of place in literature aimed at a general level.
According to the Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS) codes of 1978 (rev. 1983), the current number of kanji in current use in Japanese is 6,353. This, of course, includes many thousands of characters which are very rarely used. The approximately 1,000 characters learned in elementary school cover approximately 90% of characters used in newspapers, general literature, and of course, manga written at a general level.
References:
data adapted from Miyajima T et al 1982. Zusetsu Nihongo. (Kodokawa Shoujiten 9). Kadokawa.
It seems to me that one other major factor was overlooked - furuhon-ya, or used book stores. Generally more than half-full of manga (which reportedly is half ot the published material in Japan,) these tend to be large, brightly lit, extremely efficient, and amusingly named. (Perhaps the best example: Book Off. [link in Japanese])
In the article, Tamai mentions that the price point of tankouban, or collected volumes of manga, is around 500 - 1200 yen. Most people I know in Japan who buy tankouban do so exclusively at used book shops, for much less than half of that price. It's not uncommon to be able to buy an older series for 100 yen per book, especially when buying many volumes together in a set. Of course, you can sell the books back after your done, again at a fraction of the price you paid.
The point is when you think "used comic shop" in the states, you imagine paying $10 a pop for some plastic-encased hard-to-find issue. In Japan, the idea of paying more than the original sale price is almost ludicrous. Anything that is even remotely successful will be published to death, and republished as long as any demand exists. In the meanwhile, it will be mercilessly imitated by other artists. Only a few classic writers (Tezuka, Shirow, Miyazaki...) have unimitable style that retains its market value years later.
I'm not sure whether these shops actually benefit the manga industry or not, but I would imagine so, as there doesn't seem to be any attempt to shut them down. Over the last few years, video game manufacturers started printing "Not for Resale" notices on their packages. This was overturned in Japanese court, thank god... in rental-forbidden Japan, used book stores are about the only sane way to try and buy games.
At any rate, this is another interesting aspect of the "recycling" motif that is prevalent in manga but completely missed by the American comic market.
Slashdot Mirror
KLOV has more details, as well as a slightly sketchier rumour that the original title was intended to be "Monkey Kong", but a blurry fax caused the finished cabinet art to be titled "Donkey Kong".
There is one other major audience: mothers who want to quiet their kids about getting a Dra-Que (Dragon Quest) game, but who don't want their kids to have a system. Once the system is installed, the kids can resort to the "we have a system but no games" argument. Incidentally, these direct-plug games are fairly popular in Japan, (they gotta come from somewhere!) especially sports and karaoke games.
It's not too strange to see video games making a break into Japanese drugstores, they've been in convenience stores for years now.
Very good points. Here are a few responses:
- Cracking a dictionary will reveal hundreds of "ha" kanji, but most of them aren't commonly used. In fact, there are only 2,000 kanji commonly used in newspaper level Japanese.
- There is one critical difference between cell and land lines -- you must buy the land line from the telco (or someone else), which can cost near $1000 USD. With a keitai you only need to buy the phone, which will cost less than $100 if you're happy with last year's model. Of course, you can sell the line after, but if you're moving around a lot, it's a lot simpler to just own the cell phone.
- Cell internet is expensive by volume, (ie. web page / porn viewing) but for what is effectively a continuously connected e-mail client that you can put in your pocket, it is very cheap. Spam has been very problematic, especially with Docomo, unless you happened to have an underbar in your name. Recently, you can also use unused talk time to pay for packet use.
- Work and school hours in Japan tend to be longer. (American workers still work more paid hours, though.) There is also the tradition for the "salaryman" to loiter on his way home. Most grade-school students will be at school until at least 5:00 and often attend cram schools after. Thus the home computer is not so accessible compared to American settings. The default action for "idle time" (waiting for bus, eating McDonald's...) is to whip out your keitai and do your mails. It's that much more convenient to have them all there.
- Most younger people that I know rely on their cell phones to organize any sort of social gathering. Two of them will run into each other, and then all call / mail other people. Of course, it is still possible to function without one, but like any convenience, it becomes increasingly inconvenient to not use it as it gains popularity.
- Good point about etiquette -- many people think that cell phones are slowly destroying the morals of young Japanese use as surely as TV did to the last generation.
Typing speed for "keitai" or ultraportable devices (specifically cell phones) in Japan compares surprisingly well with desktop computing.
The main reason is that... big surprise here now... most of the typing is done in the Japanese language, and not in English. In order to type in Japanese on a QWERTY or other roman-set board, you must generally hit at least two keys per character. So hitting the same phone button two or three times (on average) to produce a character is actually faster than hunting down two separate keys and pushing them in sequence.
Furthermore, just typing the characters in doesn't mean that you're finished. You must use the "henkan" (character transformation) system. Japanese has many ways to write the same character -- for example, there are over 40 different characters for "ha". Sounds like a nightmare, but henkan systems analyze the grammatical functions of the surrounding characters to automatically generate the most likely intended output. The user must then manually touch up any discrepancies. (In related news, the henkan system is being blamed for destroying the writing ability of young Japanese people.)
With this additional overhead, raw keystrokes aren't necessarily the biggest factor in Japanese typing speed. Further, modern keitais make use of auto-completion based on words commonly entered by the user. Reports of speeds over 200 wpm aren't unbelievable when a user can enter many words with only two or three buttons! Incidentally, the average word size in Japanese is two kanji or 4 kana characters.
There is also Japan's miserable history of IT education to consider. A good friend of mine graduated from a pre-business program at her high school which included certification in computing and word processing. She can barely copy and paste. Most of their certification was on "wa-puro" or big word-processing typewriters. Until about 10 years ago, these were the staple in most offices.
Most Japanese people in their mid-20s were introduced to their own cell phone before they had even laid hands on a real computer! To many Japanese people, their keitai is their most personal and important posession. It's only to be expected that we should see advancements here affecting other technologies.
A few other points of interest:
- Japanese people are at home (and able to use their own PC) less than people in most other countries.
- Cell phones can be cheaper than using land-line phones or public phones in Japan... especially when everyone else only uses cell phones!
- Cellular internet, which charges per packet instead of by time, is much more economical for e-mail than dial-up.
- The disaster that is Japanese urban planning, and continuously changing work and social schedules make cell phones a social necessity.
No, Japan does not oppose your unilateral attack on Iraq. The Japanese people (well, about 80% of them) oppose your war. The Japanese government has already bowed, as they know that without the US policy that "an attack on Japan is an attack on the US" North Korea would nuke them in seven minutes.
Here are some recent press quotes from the Japanese Prime Minster, Mr. Jun'ichirou Koizumi.
In Japan, we actually have a "sound" that is made by a completely silent situation. It goes like this:
No kidding.
There are some theories about the origin. The most believeable is that it was originally worded to match the "white noise" that your body creates itself in the absence of other sound. You can hear it if you listen carefully enough. (Or if you have tinnitis.)
From my understanding of the article, what we have is a karaoke version of Max Smart's Hall of Hush?
I seem to remember Dell making press releases about shipping systems with Linux, but their store page is currently down with technical difficulties so I can't take a look. I'll consider the fact that their "Technical Difficulty Encountered" page says how they use Genuine Microsoft (R) Windows (tm) to be a bad sign.
You can often detect used books by opening the very last page and looking at the dust cover. This is where furuhon-ya affix the price tags. Sometimes you can see the outline of the tag or residual glue. Or, in the case of a really stupid comic shop owner, the original tag itself. I once went to a shop that had a rack of manga at the "bargain" price of $8 ... every one of them had a Book Off sticker still stuck to the inside of the dust jacket.
NOT THAT IT REALLY FREAKING MATTERS! Just goes to show my American collector mentality. The content is the same, right? If some guy can find a way to provide it to you at a lower overhead, he gets the profits.
Regarding rentals, I meant that video game rentals are prohibited in Japan (I have no idea why.) Music and video rentals are about the same as western standards. Furuhon-ya sell used books, manga, videos, music, and video games, but the only industry which seems to have attempted to shut them down is the video game industry.
The additional Japanese alphabets do not make Japanese more complicated. In fact, the kana systems (hiragana and katakana) were originally introduced to allow lower classes and women (at the time considered academically incapable of using Chinese characters) to read and write.
Reading and writing of hiragana and katakana in modern Japanese is much easier than English. Although there are slightly more (about double) the number of characters than in the roman alphabet, each character represents a single syllable, and only that syllable, with very, very few exceptions.
Thus knowing the pronunciation of the word means knowing how to write it in kana. Knowing how to read the characters means automatically knowing the pronunciation. Compare that to English where the same group of characters can have many different pronunciations. (Example: through, bough, trough, rough, cough)
Manga are not written at any level lower than other books targetted at the same audience. Of course, manga targetted at small children will omit or provide the pronunciation for difficult kanji. But so do storybooks and school textbooks.
And although manga tends to have less words than a novel, many manga series span thousands of pages and involve highly complicated story lines and character relationships. Although they can be considered "lighter" reading material page-for-page, it would generally be impossible for an illiterate person to enjoy manga above the kiddie/toilet humour or pornographic levels. Trust me, I've tried.
Firstly, Chinese characters (hanzi) do not represent words, they represent morphemes. For example, no single character can represent tense, inflection, or plurality. Secondly, Japanese kanji are not the Chinese alphabet, as the writer above suggests. Although originally introduced by the Chinese, modern kanji has far fewer characters than the Chinese alphabet. There are also many "kokuji", kanji characters made in Japan which do not exist in Chinese writing.
Except for ancient Japanese works and Chinese poems, no Japanese text is ever written entirely in kanji. (The only exception would be very short phrases like "no tresspassing" on a sign.) In fact, it is impossible to write a verb or adjective in modern Japanese without using one of the kana systems.
Using obscure kanji certainly makes a work more literary and "high-brow", much in the same way that using obscure vocabulary makes an English passage more academic. However, these characters are out of place in literature aimed at a general level.
According to the Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS) codes of 1978 (rev. 1983), the current number of kanji in current use in Japanese is 6,353. This, of course, includes many thousands of characters which are very rarely used. The approximately 1,000 characters learned in elementary school cover approximately 90% of characters used in newspapers, general literature, and of course, manga written at a general level.
References:
data adapted from Miyajima T et al 1982. Zusetsu Nihongo. (Kodokawa Shoujiten 9). Kadokawa.
Nagamura, Hirofumi 2000. "Chinese Characters, Literacy, and the Japanese Model". http://www.kh.rim.or.jp/~nagamura/literacy.html
It seems to me that one other major factor was overlooked - furuhon-ya, or used book stores. Generally more than half-full of manga (which reportedly is half ot the published material in Japan,) these tend to be large, brightly lit, extremely efficient, and amusingly named. (Perhaps the best example: Book Off. [link in Japanese])
In the article, Tamai mentions that the price point of tankouban, or collected volumes of manga, is around 500 - 1200 yen. Most people I know in Japan who buy tankouban do so exclusively at used book shops, for much less than half of that price. It's not uncommon to be able to buy an older series for 100 yen per book, especially when buying many volumes together in a set. Of course, you can sell the books back after your done, again at a fraction of the price you paid.
The point is when you think "used comic shop" in the states, you imagine paying $10 a pop for some plastic-encased hard-to-find issue. In Japan, the idea of paying more than the original sale price is almost ludicrous. Anything that is even remotely successful will be published to death, and republished as long as any demand exists. In the meanwhile, it will be mercilessly imitated by other artists. Only a few classic writers (Tezuka, Shirow, Miyazaki...) have unimitable style that retains its market value years later.
I'm not sure whether these shops actually benefit the manga industry or not, but I would imagine so, as there doesn't seem to be any attempt to shut them down. Over the last few years, video game manufacturers started printing "Not for Resale" notices on their packages. This was overturned in Japanese court, thank god... in rental-forbidden Japan, used book stores are about the only sane way to try and buy games.
At any rate, this is another interesting aspect of the "recycling" motif that is prevalent in manga but completely missed by the American comic market.