CANAAN is CANAAN, all caps, and not Canaan. LUCKY☆STAR has that star in the middle if you can manage to remember the keyboard code for it. Love★Com has a different star, though many will make do with Love*Com. s-CRY-ed is not Scryed. NieA_7 is not anything but. Baccano! has an exclamation mark. L’Arc~en~Ciel is L’Arc~en~Ciel and not L’arc-en-ciel or Larc en ciel. They are tildes, not hyphens, and make sure you capitalize that ‘a’. Dir en grey fans spot the new and the ignorant by chastising those that write Dir en Grey or, heaven forbid, Dir En Grey. Yoshitoshi ABe always has that ‘b’ capitalized; he is never Yoshitoshi Abe. Someone once told me that hyde, the vocalist for L’Arc~en~Ciel, is spelt in unassuming lowercase when associated with that particular band, but spelt as HYDE when associated with his solo work. This doesn’t always seem to be the case, but that’s one hell of a confusing thing to remember, huh?

You're doing it wrong!

Being a grammar nazi and supremely anal retentive in general, of course I always do my best to ensure I’m spelling things the way they were intended to be spelt, but sometimes, it’s just a pain in the ass, and sometimes, it’s just impossible to tell.

The stars in LUCKY☆STAR and Love★Com are are in many Japanese fonts by default, but they’re absent in most English ones, making it particularly annoying to find ways to type them. miyavi has changed his official stage name so many times, you’d have to be well-versed with his history to know which name to refer to him as during which part of his career, and with so many names. He’s been miyabi, 雅, MYV, and 雅-miyavi-, among others. Who wants to do a proper superscript when they write Tommy heavenly⁶? Or look up the not equals symbol every time they want to write cali≠gari? Same with whatever that weird German character is in Weiß Kreuz, though that’s more “it’s a different language” and less “goddammit, why does there need to be a funky symbol there?!” It’s hard fighting with the obsessive need to do things right and the overwhelming practicality in just not caring.

The SEED in Gundam SEED should be capitalized. I know this because Japanese magazines always write the SEED in capitalized roman letters, even when the rest of it is in kana. But many other series have the entire title “officially” in kana, and then it’s more or less up to translators to dictate how they’re romanized and how particular their spellings are. For example, I’ve seen people write both Beck and BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad. The latter is more popular, but the original (ベック) is all katanana with no subtitle, so who knows? Similarly, is プラネテス PLANETES or Planetes? Should SOUL EATER be capitalized? It is in the logo, but it’s also just ソウルイーター.

The fact that there is no real equivalent to capital letters in Japanese pretty much means that they can have a field day with it and do whatever they want. (They kind of do whatever they want with English anyway.) Most likely, they use it just as a means to stand apart. “SOUL EATER” may or may not be more dramatic than “Soul Eater” — do the Japanese percieve the capital letters to be like shouting like we do? Or is it just different, but not necessarily “louder”? It’s not that hard to remember that ELLEGARDEN, RURUTIA, and ONE OK ROCK are capitalized, or that angela and stereophony are lowercase if we don’t think of them as capital or lowercase letters. They’re just symbols representing a subject. A capital letter does not denote a proper noun and lowercase does not denote a common word. Forget all your rules and just recognize them as what they are. And all the other quirks they pull aside from capitalization/lack of, all the weird spacing and symbols — all just ways to stand out. They aren’t “weird” symbols; they’re just part of the name.

But then sometimes I get the distinct feeling that even the namebearers don’t care that much about how their names are spelt. It’s just all the neurotic fans like me making a big deal out of it. For example, Dir en grey. Only the ‘d’ is capitalized, right? That’s how it’s written on magazines and all of their albums until the Marrow of the Bone (2007), at which point it became DIRENGREY, though I’m not sure if that was an “official” name change or just a typographical choice reflecting musical changes. In any case, neither “Dir en grey” nor “DIRENGREY” is what Shinya, their drummer, wrote on the autographed drumpad he threw out into the pit when I saw them last November.

Nope. That says “DIR en Grey.” Kind of weird, yes? Not even “Dir en grey.” Geez, Shinya, learn how to spell your own band’s name! How can you expect self-righteous fans to yell at other, “less knowing” fans if you can’t even get it right? Maybe in the end, it really doesn’t matter at all as long as people know what you’re talking about, but that doesn’t sit well with the obsessive-compulsive. I don’t care if you capitalize things in odd places or don’t capitalize things or put stars in the middle of words that are impossible for Westerners to type. I just want there to be a right way to write things. Is that so much to ask?

For the record, I did not catch that drumpad (sadly). I just ran into the person who did after the show and got a picture.

Undoubtedly, that’s why a lot of younger fans will insert bits and pieces of what they know into their speech or text online. It’s like a secret language, something esoteric to share between friends, and everybody likes thinking they’re special. Like Pig Latin though, the language is actually not so secret, or at the very least, the popular tidbits of the language that young fans like to parrot are not so secret, and they tend to annoy everybody over a certain age. Ostracized and mocked by the rest of the community, the young fans reach a point where they stop tacking -chan and -kun after all their friends’ names. There is a brief “maturing” period. And then they decide that they’re going to knuckle down and learn Japanese… for real this time.

I imagine that most people will take a few shots at memorizing their kana and then give up. They’ll retain all the romaji vocabulary and phrases they know, and maybe they’ll still use it now and again in a mocking or less-than-serious manner, but that’s about it. Some will succeed in memorizing their kana and master some grammar, but kanji stops them dead in their tracks. The last handful plow right on through, kick the JLPT’s ass, and then run off to Japan to teach English because that’s your stereotypical otaku dream. I wonder, are there any fans that listen to the language on a regular basis, but who have never had any interest whatsoever in learning it? Or is it just innate to want to understand something you find yourself so submerged in? The latter makes sense to me, but it’d be interesting to hear the answers to the contrary.

Being Chinese, I’ve always felt this persistent guilt for wanting to learn Japanese more than I wanted to re-learn Mandarin and Cantonese since I pretty much lost my fluency in both by the time I was eight. That guilt, for the most part, has kept me from seriously pursuing Japanese fluency. Now, it seems that I have a good chance of being able to go to Japan for two weeks in December as part of a college trip. I guess that’s as good an excuse as any to get a move on, right?

So I got my hands on My Japanese Coach for the Nintendo DS because it was easy and convenient. It’s far from the most sophisticated learning device in the world, but hey, I still don’t know how serious I want to be about this. The game opens with a placement test, which aims to start you off in the right chapter based on your existing knowledge. I found that to be kind of iffy though. Since all the questions are multiple choice, lucky guesses will end up opting you out of lessons you might need. Yeah, I know a bunch of pronouns and the colors, but I didn’t know any of the days of the week and I got out of that chapter with some lucky guesses. Not cool. I need to learn this stuff, man. (Still, you can go back and do the skipped lessons, so it’s not a huge deal.)

Playing through it, the set-up of the game leaves a lot to be desired. Each lesson is fairly short and will either cover one new concept, like months, days of the week, colors, or a certain verb, or two sets of kana (I’m not that far in the game yet, but undoubtedly, later chapters will expand to include sets of five to ten kanji per lesson). The game won’t let you progress to the next lesson until you’ve “mastered” all the new vocabulary or kana introduced in that lesson. You gain mastery points by playing through games. It sounds decent enough, but I found most of the games to be absurdly easy, thus making it way, way too easy to “master” things.

You can unlock new games as you progress through various lessons, but seriously, out of the seven or eight games I have so far, I only really like one of them, and that’s the one that gives you a word or kana and makes you write it. It’s useful for forcing you to memorize your kana, but it’s pretty annoying for writing actual words (in kana) since you have to write each character one at a time. Longish words like げつようび (getsuyoubi, Monday) or じゅいちがつ (juichigatsu, November) really make me wish the kanji lessons would come up faster. The game also isn’t all that great at recognizing mistakes in your characters. As long as you have the right number of strokes and the shape is kinda right, it’ll count it correct. It bothers me immensely that it doesn’t take stroke order into consideration even though it does mention its importance at some point. The other games are okay as far as drilling in meaning associations, but among other things, having to play the whack-a-mole game makes me feel like an idiot.

Currently, I’m just about done “mastering” hiragana, but honestly, I still don’t feel very confident in it. Kanji, in all its apparent complication, makes a helluva lot more sense to me because of my Chinese background, but hiragana doesn’t seem to follow any discernable pattern as far as I can tell. I mean, き(ki) and さ(sa) are completely different sounds, but their characters are so similar. ら(ra), ろ(ro), and る(ru) make slightly more sense. Kind of, except that れ(re) and り(ri) don’t follow. Incidentally, Mandarin has a pronunciation aid system similar to furigana, but I never learned it, only pinying, which is comparable to romaji. My father says that both hiragana and katakana characters are based off kanji words that start with the sound they represent, but that doesn’t really help me if I don’t know those kanji words.

My Japanese Coach is an okay aid. It’s easy enough to pick up on a daily basis, but you have to play back through old lessons pretty frequently to actually memorize things since you can “master” them so quickly. It’s just as well though — after all, you have to work at any language to learn it. No tool is going to just hand the knowledge to you. I might come back and write about the game some more when I’ve progressed further into it. At present, I don’t plan on getting much else in the way of language learning tools because I’m poor and don’t have a lot of time anyway. I would love to learn Japanese, but it’s still not a real, hardcore serious goal yet. I really think I need to reattain some level of fluency in Chinese before that can happen.

In the meantime, it’s back to the hiragana charts!

Further, “Sharuru” seems to be some kind of universally accepted Japanese version of “Charles” because Code Geass was not the only series where I heard the transliteration. Who decided that “Charles” should be “Sharuru”? If someone else decided that they wanted to transliterate it as “Charuzu,” would they be wrong? Are there multiple ways to import a name into another language?

For the reverse case, Japanese names into English, the answer seems to be yes. For FUNimatioin’s recent license, Spice and Wolf, they’ve decided to transliterate ホロ as “Holo” rather than the fan-preferred “Horo.” Since the Japanese use the same sound where Westerners distinguish between L’s and R’s, either version can technically be correct. Nevertheless, the らりるれろ sounds are more often seen as R sounds (ra, ri, ru, re, ro) than L sounds (la, li, lu, le, lo). And for Horo’s case in particular, I can’t shake the idea that “Holo” will invoke “holographic” first and “awesome wolf deity” second. Meanwhile, “Horo” is kindasorta similar to “Horus” an Egyptian falcon god.

And then there is the fun thing they do when they have English names transliterated into Japanese only to be transliterated back into English. Except that the two English versions don’t match. The best example of this is probably Simon from Gurren Lagann. The Japanese have no character for “si,” only し/シ (“shi”), and so, Simon was pronounced シモン (“Shimon”). When Gurren Lagann was dubbed by Bandai, they kept that pronunciation, presumably because of perceived fan pressure. The same can be said for Viral, which retained the “vee-rall” pronunciation instead of “fixing” it back to “vhai-rul.”

In Horo’s case, fan preference may be more legitimate since the name isn’t English to begin with, but in Simon and Viral’s cases, should Bandai have given in? Would it really have been that weird to hear the names pronounced “correctly”? I don’t really think so. And if they were going to play it the Japanese way, why didn’t they go all the way with Viral and leave it as “V/Biraru”? That’d be pushing it too far with the lip movements, I guess? It can be debated whether or not Simon and Viral were intended to be English names to begin with — even though they’re obviously not Japanese, it’s possible that they could be fantasy names instead. But they seem kind of plain for fantasy names, don’t you think? After all, Japanese fantasy has come up with names such as Zelgadis Greywords, Filia Ul Copt, and Yozak Gurrier, and even those are Western-based. I wonder if there really is a “right” or “wrong” way to pronounce Simon and Viral since it’s been passed through languages the way it has. I’m sure fanboys will swear to “Shimon” and “Vee-rall,” but are they just subscribing to the Japanese’s limited phonetics?

Still, as far as natively Japanese names go, I’m glad for the shift towards preservation of pronunciation. The Sakura in Card Captor Sakura was dubbed as “Sa-kuur-ah” with a long “u” sound. The more recent Sakura of Naruto has been dubbed more correctly as “Sah-kuu-rah” with a short “u.” And yet, Akira was dubbed years ago correctly (with a soft “i” sound), and most people I know still pronounce it with a hard “i”?

One last thing… who the hell decided that they could name their child “Light” — an obviously English word — and then assign it the kanji for “moon”? (月 “tsuki”) How does that even work?? Obviously, no one will intrinsically understand that “tsuki” should be read as “Light” (or ライト”Raito” since they can’t actually pronounce “Light”) because Misa didn’t know offhand. So did Light just spend his life ‘”correcting” teachers saying, “No, ma’am, you’re wrong, it’s not ‘tsuki’ like it is in the dictionary, it’s ‘Raito’!”? Says who?? Your crazy parents?

Why do they get to decide that “Light” can be represented by 月 “tsuki”? Why didn’t they just use 光 “hikari” which actually means “light”? Because Hikari is actually a legitimate name? (A female name, but a name nonetheless!) I guess they didn’t want Light to go through life being mistaken as a girl during rolecall, so instead, they made him special by giving him the wrong character for the translation? Maybe that’s why he turned into such a megalomaniac.

The mystery of Light Yagami, solved!

Then again, the forcing of kanji for an English word has happened for things other than names.

Baww, shoujo. Damn the genre for being so appropriate for adaptation into live action because there are so many series I want to check out now (still need to hunt down the Nodame Cantabile dramas). If the first NANA movie is any indication of how awesome these adaptations can be (granted, I haven’t seen the anime nor read the manga in that case), then I’m pretty sure the Nodame and Love★Com are at least worth checking out.

I discovered whilst looking up some information for the review that most of the characters in Love★Com speak in a Kansai/Osaka dialect. What followed was a gigantic “no wonder!” kind of epiphany. I am simultaneously proud of and endlessly amused at the fact that I noticed something was off about the way they were speaking — sure, it would be LOL OBVIOUS to someone with better knowledge of the language, but for a weeaboo, I’d say just noticing at all isn’t bad. :P The easiest indications were the replacement of “aho” for “baka,” which I also noticed in BECK way back when, and “na” for “ne.” The second easiest was the substituion of “chau” for “chigau” because the dialect apparently likes to contract the hell out of everything (which makes a lot more sense than whatever the hell Shanghainese does to Mandarin!).

Purusing through this list, I spotted a good number of other things that I noticed, including “denna” for “desu ne” though I believe Seiko and a few others still used “desu ne.” Actually, I also noticed that a lot of things on that list didn’t actually show up. Otani definitely never used “wai” in place of “ore,” and Risa never used “wate” in place of “watashi” or “atashi.” I really love first person pronouns in Japanese (they’re so much fun and can say so much about certain characters!), so I’d have probably noticed much faster if those had been swapped out. Also unmentioned on the list is “-chi” as an affectionate suffix, though I don’t know that much about it either way — why did they only use it for Nakao? And why did both Risa and Nobuko use it?

Fun times, Japanese. I should just get off my ass and learn it some day. I might be going there in December. Maybe that can be some motivation.

Of course, there are some American artists that will use Japanese katakana sound effects in their pages even though the comic is in English and reads left-to-right. Off the top of my head, I know Christy Lijewski, a SCAD grad, and rem, a Houstonian, both do this (though sometimes rem draws right-to-left). The difference is that both of them legitimately know the language, and I don’t (yet?), so I guess I’d feel a little pretentious using katakana in my comics even though I could probably pull it off well enough.

So the question of the day becomes… why aren’t there more English sound effects? Why don’t we also have sounds for things like “shock,” “silence,” “rudeness,” “flailing,” or “a quick glance sideways”? Sure, it is kind of ridiculous to have sound effects for things that inherently have no sound, but it certainly is useful. One of my roommates hypothesized that Japanese theatre might have inspired some of their sound effects since it might not have always been apparent what was going on in nondescript genres like shadow and puppet theatre, so they could have utilized a wide range of informative sound effects to help things along? Honestly though, I know little of Japanese theatre and am really just grasping at straws here.

Either way, I don’t really think America has such an extensive, nonverbal theatrical background, so maybe it’s a legitimate guess either way. British and American stageplays relied on wide arm gestures and overacting to get things across. Manga had to have made up a lot of stuff on their own though, and American comics have been around just as long, so again, why don’t we have sound effects like じ～ (ji~) for “silence” or “staring”? Instead, we will just actually use the word “silence” or “stare” or an elipse (“…”) to get the point across, which isn’t nearly as visually pleasing in my opinion. Besides, I’m more inclined to believe that じ can be used in a serious scene than “silence,” which just looks comical (…haha, pun).

I wonder how those sorts of conventions get started. Is it just something that one mangaka decides to do and others eventually understand and implement it also? Who decided that じ should represent “silence”? Or that いそ (iso) should mean “moving happily”? They aren’t real onomatopoeias like ちゅ (chu) or ふふふふ (fufufufu) which actually represent sounds, so they aren’t self-evident… unless the Japanese all just have a hard-wired, instinctual knowledge of sound effects that aren’t sounds. Does the first person to use the sound effect just throw in an editor’s note? How long does it take to integrate in a new sound effect? Does anyone ever sit back and wonder why the hell silence has a sound effect?

Meanwhile, in America, comic book artists are throwing things against walls trying to figure out what kind of sounds they make (seriously, I know people that do this), but once again, those are still real sounds. No one is trying to come up with “sound effects” for actions. I guess logically, it would make sense to just represent actions with the verb for the action, but it’s just so… logical, I suppose. Not exciting. Not interesting. I am interested in these strange Japanese sounds for things that don’t make sounds. Using “knock knock” for knocking is kind of lame. But even for things that do make sounds, I feel like the American library of sound effects is very limited. Specifically, I have a scene where a woman is crying. I was trying to come up with a sound effect for sobbing, but… all I could come up with was “sob sob” — decidedly lame. Very lame. But what else do we use to represent that sound? When I visualize someone crying, I guess it kind of sounds like “hua hua” with the occasional “hmf” for sniffing and “hnn” or something, but that’s only after a lot of hard thinking and trying to translate those weird noises into words. And when I read those words, I don’t immediately think back to “crying.” Why is this so hard?

The amazing Japanese sound effect dictionary linked above describes しく (shiku) as “sobbing” or “whimpering,” and I guess I could hear that as a crying sound. Is it more apparent to the Japanese? (How the hell did these translators figure all this out anyway?) It’s all a mystery to me… but I do still wish that Americans would just make something up for those sounds, even if they don’t make a whole lot of sense. At least then I’d have more options. I wonder if people will just think I’m retarded if I start making up weird-ass sound effects in my comics. Maybe years later, they will eventually adopt “ghnnnnn” as the sound for American silence and a cartoon show will make fun of it by having someone actually say “ghnnnnn” when they are trying to represent silence. That would be kind of awesome.

Personally, I’ve never really considered “manga” to be much more than the Japanese term for comics. Because of the general public consensus that “manga” is narrowed to mean only comics of Japanese origin though, I usually won’t call comics of other origins by the term. But I’ll still use “comics” to refer to manga as no one seems to disagree that it carries a broader definition. No one says that “comic” can only refer to American or English-language sequential art. Yes, there are differences in Japanese and overseas comics, but in modern times, I don’t think that these differences are divisive enough to be rousing such heated debates. After all, within both Japan and the United States, styles vary greatly between artists and titles. Batman has been drawn a hundred different ways and has never looked anything like Jughead. Major Motoko Kusanagi, thankfully, looks nothing like Astro Boy.

Definitions are a funny thing, especially since they aren’t nearly as concrete as most people would like (including myself). In grade school, we read the book Frindle. I still own my copy of it at home, and I still think it addresses an interesting topic. After all, what is anyone to do when the population that uses the word doesn’t agree with itself about what it means? This seems to happen a lot within the anime/manga community because of the high number of originally Japanese terms that we’ve come to adopt (“otaku” and “yaoi” are two other controversial terms that immediately come to mind).

So OEL — Original English Language — manga, or global manga, for those that aren’t in English. Should we be calling them manga at all if it isn’t coming from Japan? Since I don’t believe that all Japanese comics fit under an overarching style, I don’t really believe in the argument that “manga” is simply an artistic style. Thus, no matter how manga-influenced a comic is, under the general consensus that manga = Japanese comics, OEL doesn’t need to have the term manga attached to it. But still, it doesn’t bother me that much because, like I said, to me personally, manga is less “Japanese comics” than it is “the Japanese word for comics.” And under the latter definition, “OEL manga” is fine.

Of course, then one might wonder, if it’s English language, why use a Japanese term at all? Well, it’s like Frindle, I suppose. Regardless of origins, “manga” has more or less been adopted into our language, and most people who like comics knows what it means. It’s like rendezvous and coup d’état and a billion other words in the “English” language. Manga has become accepted. Kind of. It brings us back to the first point of what its definition really is. Is it synonymous with “comic”? Or is it specifically “Japanese comics”?

Even if it does mean just Japanese comics, I don’t see the need to throw fits over it. I think a lot of manga-influenced artists (and promoters and marketers) were just looking for a new term to fit themselves under because “manga-influenced” makes them sound like wannabes and because they felt otherwise outcasted in the Western comic world where many people still consider manga to be “the enemy.” The manga-influenced would try to cater to the manga-readers because the Western comic-readers shun them. I’m tired of this divide. All artists draw influences from all over the place, and as I reject the idea that manga has a cohesive style, it doesn’t make sense to me that “manga-influenced” should be demeaning or limiting.

Yes, there are broad generalizations that people accept — Western-style is more angular and manga/Eastern-style is more rounded and fluid; panel layouts and angles are approached differently, and there are different sets of symbolism, but these things are so damn general that they shouldn’t even matter at all. As long as you can tell a story, who cares? Why does it matter whether you look up to Frank Miller or Kubo Tite? Manga-influenced artists shouldn’t be made to feel like they’re less original or less creative somehow because they prefer One Piece to Iron Man.

Besides, it isn’t like you could ever mistake an OEL title for a Japanese comic. So… in conclusion… I dunno. I don’t really think we need a term for OEL other than “comic,” but I’m not entirely against it either. If the term makes marketing and promotion more manageable and allows them to find the right audience, then it’s all worth it in the end, I guess. Most likely, I’m indifferent to the whole thing and just want people to stop arguing about it.

Our manga generation has broken a lot of new ground though. What would you call a comic by a Japanese-American artist? Would it depend on where it’s published first? Or better yet, what would you call a Japanese-American collaboration that’s released simultaneously in both countries like TOKYOPOP’s Princess Ai? These sorts of crossovers will only become more common as both manga and comics in general continue to expand their reach globally, so I think it would be easiest to just accept all our differences and bill everything as a comic, plain and simple. (Or even as “manga,” if there’s ever a consensus for manga to be 100% synonymous with “comic.”)