Just Stop It – Yeah, you Debito!

In 2010-2011 a good friend of mine visited Japan and taught Australian Studies at Todai (Tokyo University). I was overjoyed because it had been some time since I had last seen him and also because in addition to being highly astute he is a great conversationalist. Finally, someone with whom I could share my own experiences of living in Japan (coming up on close to ten years altogether). What was so refreshing about the limited conversations we had was his total lack of bitterness prevalent among gaijin. As I have written elsewhere there is a general persistent malaise infecting Anglosphere gaijin in Japan, a malaise that might correctly be diagnosed as a failure to recognise the limits of their cultural universality and the resultant bitterness that manifests as they are trapped within a hyper-speed game of conceptual Pong in which they are always on the losing team.

An admission: I have had moments of bitterness. While I take full responsibility for them, I am also able to locate, on reflection their origins: the miasma of self-perpetuating “opinion” offered up as knowledge across what seems to be the entire English-language internet relating to Japan. In other words, going online for help resulted in self-fulfilling, paranoid and unreconstructed retreads of other people’s stories. What is worse, is that a number of supposedly authoritative online voices from high profile activists such as Arudo Debito seem to relish in and gleefully spread cynical screeds against issues that with a little more thought and a tad more contextual awareness would not be as difficult or terrible as they make out.

Debito is an odd bird. On emigrating to Japan he eventually attained naturalised Japanese citizenship, quite a rare feat for a Westerner. Indeed, his precedent, along with his civic-rights-oriented activist bent caused him to rise to some degree of fame. His fifteen minutes came when he won a lawsuit against a Hokkaido hot springs owner who had denied him and one of his daughters entry on grounds of race. But it seems that Debito’s hunger for fame or at least admiration as a vanguard activist eclipsed his capacity for considered reflection and contextual awareness. A casual read of his blog reveals a number of interesting and high profile stories to do with illegal discrimination and everyday life in Japan. The blog also seems regularly frequented by a number of people with similar interests. However, with sustained, continuous engagement it begins to be possible to locate an underlying bitterness and personal dissatisfaction that quite clearly colours his writings. What had started out as spotlighting and acting on injustice has turned into smug, chauvinistic critique.

In his latest Japan Times column “These are a few of my favourite things in Japan” in the semi-regular opinion series “Just Be Cause,” Debito employs a spot of silver tonguing in an attempt to both “be positive” and offer salient critique. Indeed, the former idea is a rather antiquated internet discussion rhetorical device frequently employed by those inclined to plead “but you never say anything good” or “If it’s so bad, just go home”. As for the latter, observation has always been Debito’s strong suit, critique, less so. Both combined make for a dire reading experience in which each compliment appears poisoned by an invisible yet omnipresent sarcastic smirk. One further issue is his flippant disregard of Japanese satire and the role of irony/sarcasm in Japanese society.

While correct in asserting a lack of emphasis on sarcasm as a legitimate means of communicating humour or social analysis, he fails to tell us just why it matters. After all, he points out how Anglosphere cultures have a rich tradition of sarcasm and stinging social critique, but fails to let us know that a lot of this critique has its origins in class politics as a way of shoring up class hierarchies and dismissing lower class cultural practice. In fact I would be more interested in his take on social critique from a Japanese perspective in relation to Anglosphere critique and ironic modes of humour. But then again, whenever Debito writes, it is always from the location of a particular kind of gaijin crystallised in time and place, a kind of outsider who knows more than his green-behind-the-ears fan base but seems incapable of getting inside a local, cultural perspective. While clearly proficient in Japanese to a certain level, Debito appears to be culturally illiterate when it comes to examining similar phenomena from different cultural perspectives.

Obviously, his latest column is supposed to be an exercise in humour and appeal to the gaijin readership of the Japan Times. In such a genre, he hardly has the time or space to address in detail any of the critiques I have raised here. It would be nice, however, to see writing from such a prominent gaijin who attained permanent residency in 1996 and citizenship in 2000. That is a long time to hold onto such limited outsider concepts at the expense of digging deep into the local mind beyond adversarial escapades in so-called activism. Why not start writing in Japanese? Why not start engaging with actual local community beyond the gaijin Anglosphere, in their own language. So in regards to the shots fired at Japan from an American distance away, I say, “Stop it, Debito, just stop it!” If you want to have any relevance at all in terms of Japan’s multicultural future, you may need to redraft your terms of war. In fact, leave the war behind and make peace. Dude.

How about a fair fight? Human on Human

Way, way back in Too Old I criticised Jaron Lanier’s concept of hip hop. I stand by that critique. However, as time moves forward and social media continues to be integrated and moreover, normalised in contemporary technolgised societies, much of what Lanier had to say in relation to mob mentality, crowd wisdom and anonymity holds true. What I want to return to specifically in Lanier’s work is the idea of human elegance in programming.

Last month Bonkras, a computer program with some serious processing muscle behind it again defeated legendary shogi player, Kunio Yonenaga in a hyped event not unlike that of IBM’s Big Blue and Kasparov. Though it must be said that Yonenaga was a far more graceful loser. As usual a flood of analytical reporting sluiced through prime time current affairs and variety shows, all under the heading “Man versus machine” (etc). It only took the first such headline to send my mind at lightspeed (or thereabouts) to Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget. Lanier rightly points out that in spite all of the processing power and depth capable in contemporary software, the all too frequent trope of the machine beating the human is not only flawed but essentially a logical fallacy. After all, it was humans in the first place who created the platform for the software to run on in addition to the software itself. Frequently such misanthropic software takes months if not years in actual man hours and numerous testers, debuggers, graphic designers, engineers and mathematicians to produce. Indeed, if we were to properly frame Yonenaga’s recent rematch defeat it would be more sensible and far less human hating to render it:

“Team of humans building on the work of hundreds of mathematicians, programmers and engineers before them find a way of (a) externalising a number of calculations relating to a highly specific, highly controlled and limited environment via post-mechanical, integrated circuit technology after many months of research, trial and error and then (b) pit this technology against a human who, like the majority of the species is incapable of making calculations at the speed and density of machine mentioned at (a) and then waiting for the (inevitable) outcome.”

Although accurate, a far less attention grabbing headline. What is interesting to me is that we rarely think twice about the mechanical advantages most machines have over humans in most situations (from bulldozers to power saws). However, when it comes to the mind there seems to be a fascination around the binary culture/nature, machine/man, as though they are not in fact one and the same. May I stand accused of sour-graping Bonkras’ victory, but is it not bleedingly obvious that had someone not turned on a power switch and launched the software application, Yonenaga’s victory would have been assured. At least, at this level, the necessity for a human hand can easily be seen.

I believe what would be more interesting and more deserving of praise would be rival Bonkras type programs which would allow a level playing field, where multiple teams put their software, calculating and algorithm creating prowess to the test by facing off against each other. It is neither sporting nor fair to place an external calculating device designed to a maintained by a team of professionals against a single human opponent. After all, let us take a look at some of the mathematics involved. A computer is capable of number crunching at a level far outstripping human capacity and on raw numbers alone, it is thus capable of taking a vast amount of database information probability and correlating it against mathematical possibility within the environmental confines of the game itself.

In other words, shogi-master-crushing-software can draw on an entire recorded history of actual moves at various stages of a single game, it can also reference paths to victory and defeat and then analyse them in terms of frequency. Furthermore, path trends based on frequency of use correlated to actual number of victories/defeats over time can be analysed in order to develop a probability tree which can be further divided according to per turn or event based timing. All of this raw data and analytical data of actual patterns over time forms a probability matrix. This probability matrix can then be indexed against a possibility matrix which is made up of the actual number of possible moves given the environmental (a nine by nine board) and rule based (especially the ability to return pieces to the board) conditions/limitations. The scale of the probability matrix is truly awesome. As I am not a mathematician, my analogies will be crude and probably to some degree incorrect. Astute readers, please correct!

Let us say that post-Pacific War (1945 onward) there are shogi tournaments in four major urban centres (Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Fukuoka) with eighty participants drawn from the cities and surrounds capable of playing at a semi-pro and professional level. That is a total of 320 players in a national “league”. Then let us presume that there are a total of four elimination tree tournaments per year, plus a final fifth to determine overall champions in each league. At this point alone, in a single urban centre we have a total of: eighty games in a single tournament which includes progress to the end and the determination of a third place winner. Multiply this by four (number of tournaments in a single year) for a total of 320 games played. Let us say that the top twenty from each urban centre are chosen to play in a national tournament, that is another eighty games played for a total of 400 games in a year. For the sake of simplicity, I am not including special events, champion versus champion exhibitions matches and so on. But that 400 is not the end, we have skipped a step, first let us go back to the local leagues. 320 games/league per year is a total of 1280 in addition to the 80 “national” championship rounds for a grand total of 1360 games per year of recorded professional level shogi. Multiply that number again by 67 (difference in years between present and beginning of records) for a total of 91,120 games to provide the base raw data for a program to analyse.

Now let us put this number in context. If a game of shogi takes thirty minutes to play to completion (and this is a conservative, lower limit estimate) then the total time spent to complete 91,120 games is 2,733,600 minutes, or 45,560 hours or again 1,898 days which is equivalent to just over five years of non-stop, shogi with no breaks for eating, drinking, sleeping or living. Simply put, it is unlikely any human in existence is capable of calculating at a speed required in order to effectively beat a software based opponent capable of utilising this data in real time on a consistent basis. Rise of the robots indeed.

Do not fear reader, as I am no technophobe. My ever-suffering partner would attest otherwise simply by starting to count the number of gadgets in my possession. As I have written again elsewhere, a software program is as elegant piece of engineering or art as anything else, more physically based that preceded it. I have written about my return to heavy metal but have only touched ever so briefly on my return to gaming. And that return can be attribute to Lanier’s argument presented above. When games are not conceptualised as “mindless” diversions, “mere” entertainment or painfully legitimised as “art” and instead seen as a conceptual interface between a user and programmer/programming team, it becomes possible to enjoy gaming on a meta level while still enjoying the thrill of shaving precious 100ths of seconds of Mario Kart 7 time attack times. When gaming on the Zen level it becomes possible to locate engineering pragmatics, hardware and software based coding limitations and personal idiosyncrasies of the creators.

Zen level gaming is a term I use to refer to the practice or event of being simultaneously engaged with the problem posed by the software at hand and then attempting to understand how that problem sits in the wider game as a mechanical consideration (in other words an attempt to contextualise the game in time and space). In days past, this was easier than it was now as hardware limitations imposed discipline on colour palettes, sound frequencies and calculations. With today’s processors, truly breathtaking virtual worlds, down to the smallest level of detail are created and finding the “logic” an mechanisms of the games can be somewhat more difficult. Though not always. This is simply another articulation of the Bonkras/Big Blue paradigm. Games offer far richer ways to humans of interacting with complex environments with restrictions reduced for the purpose of creating a sense of freedom. Designers are working ever-harder, in tandem with hardware developers to cover their tracks, to paper over conceptual/perceptual cracks and create mind bending illusions for preventing discovery of deus ex machina. But new generations of children (and curious adults for that matter), weaned on and equally familiar with evolving digital technological frameworks continuously find new ways of simultaneous engagement and reflexive distance. In other words any distances achieved between artificially assigned separations between human and machine are constantly closed through evolving use patterns.

To me then this whole “man vs machine” debate is deeply problematic. It relies on a populist and incorrect separation of human and technology which is at best naive and at worst irredeemably cynical. Humans have learned to see and create the world through calculation a concept they created, just like memory or language, which in a full feedback loop comes to continuously (re)create them. Technological innovation stemming from calculation has allowed us to exceed our limitations in virtually every natural, limiting element. Thus there is no such thing as “man vs machine” since “machine” can only ever be, even when (apparently) fully separate from human biology by way of artificial intelligence, of human. Let us set the correct terms for a fair fight, then?

What would Jesus choose?

What follows is the first in a series of questions entitled “What would Jesus do?”. Only tangentially to do with religion, this series asks the hard question: “If you can only choose between A and B, which would you choose”. The first question:

Beneath the Remains or Arise?

As a young metal head it took me years to get around to listening to Sepultura’s Arise. It would be many more years later until I heard Beneath the Remains, and longer still until it “clicked” for me. My Sepulchral inroad was 1994’s Chaos AD. From the loose tribal drumming, propulsive riffing and a spit in the face of the first world defiant swagger, I was hooked. By contrast the seamless death/thrash blend of Arise appeared dated and regressive to a younger me. But after multiple listens, Arise started to gel and I began to appreciate the fine line it walked between two extreme musical genres. Arise’s strong points are its precision and focus, it is a tightly structured, well paced and balanced album, certainly worthy of the praise heaped upon it. So then comes my belated engagement with Beneath the Remains. Where Arise straddled genres, Remains inhabited the interstice between period aesthetics. Maintaining a heft dose of primitive early thrash yet pushing forward towards exacting sonic devastation, Remains functions as a kind of a portal into possible proto-alternative futures for thrash and death metal. Lyrically, Arise is the stronger of the two and likely reflects the length of time after the band’s shift to a North American context. However, while Arise might be stronger and more consistent lyrically, stylistically, Remains takes more risks, sounding like a band still trying to find its sound. This nascent version of the still young band simply doesn’t give a damn one way or the other about external stylistic conventions.

Judgement: I must admit, I have never been a fan of either/or binaries but when presented with one (even if the presenter and presentee are the same) I cannot shy away from participating whether to undermine the prevailing logic or to simply broadcast my terrible taste. As for the question at hand, while I have a lot of affection and a nostalgic soft spot for Arise, it is Beneath the Remains which helps improve this grandpa’s blood flow. Remains holds looseness and unpredictability against Arise’s exacting sounds and that spirit of experimentation is what wins me over to this day.

Lost in Translation/Translating Culture

About a year ago I received my first translation contract (Japanese to English, computer software GUI and 600 page manual). While I have never formally trained as a translator nor studied Japanese language in any official capacity, I have however lived, worked and loved in Japan for close to eight years. When I had free time at work, I studied kanji (Chinese characters), when I had a day off, I would do grammar drills, endlessly writing out example sentences and my own variations. Although my mother was bilingual (English, Slovenian), home-life was all English. I grew up monolingual and made myself bilingual.

Recently, I came across Mattie Brice’s story on Popmatters about English language voice acting in games originating from Japan. Brice’s article in many ways mirrors and clearly articulates a few thoughts I have had rumbling about in my mind over the last few years. Several years ago, I came across a news story (which, despite searching around has failed to reappear) about translation of Toni Morrison into Japanese. I cannot comment on neither the veracity of the argument nor the accuracy of my memory, but I distinctly remember mention of the use of Japanese regional dialects (particularly the well known/stigmatised Aomori and Tohoku dialects) as substitutes for regional and African American dialects. However, I was able to find reference to this phenomenon in Mie Hiramoto’s essay on the Japanese translation of Margaret Mitchell’s well known 1936 novel, Gone With the Wind (Hiramoto, 2009):

While it is certain that the minority characters’ use of non-Standard Japanese – which

strongly resembles the stigmatized Toohoku dialect, or Toohoku-ben (TB) – is a

translation of the original non-Standard English (SE), the assignment to them of

something resembling a particular regional Japanese dialect reinforces linguistic

inferiorization of the slaves and poor whites, as well as TB speakers. The use of

this pseudo-dialect is an important element in the linguistic representation of

marginal characters and likewise underscores the salient marginality of TB in

Japanese language ideology.

Dialect is notoriously hard to translate, with feeling. That is, while the basic meaning of a regional non-standard utterance can be easily translated, translating the context of that dialect is much more difficult. For example, when at home with my family, I often use Owari-ben (a north-west variation on Nagoya-ben). In Owari-ben the existence verb –iru (English: is/am/are) is substituted with oru (a humble form of -iru). This usage most frequently appears when talking about the location of people and animals as well as in the present continuous verb conjugations.

Is 6810 around?

Yeah he is.

６８１０、おる？

うんおるよ。

6810, oru?

Un, oru yo.

That was easy enough, right? Well, yes and no. You see, what is absent from this translation is the reasoning behind usage of non-standard Japanese. In other words, when I use oru instead of iru, what else am I trying to say?

I refer you back to my earlier posts on where I am from, my “people” so to speak. I spent my childhood in a poverty prison known as a housing commission estate. As a result, there are certain forms of intonation, word choice and word order which resonate with me almost twenty years later. To use my own English dialect in Japan would make me quite difficult to understand. This is because the cultural gap between Australia and Japan in terms of public housing, wealth distribution and poverty is more like a chasm. If I choose to speak such English, I choose to foreground an aspect of my identity which if I am brutally honest has little to do with the life I currently lead (even if does, as I said earlier, still resonate). However, when I reminisce with my brother, the poor, rural dialect peppered with Bundjalung (Northern NSW Aboriginal cultural/linguistic group) feels much closer to and more capable of accurately representing our experience. So when I choose oru over iru, again I am making a decision to foreground my sense of belonging to the area I have called home for the past eight years. I stand up and say, “Hey, I’m from Owari, by the Kiso river. I might be a foreigner, but I’m kind of local now”.

Similarly, Japanese television, cinema, literature and music often (though not often enough, there is still in many cases a stigma attached to non-standard Japanese dialect) makes use of dialect in order to place people. People placed in a geography and a history are given an identity, most likely foreign to that of the reader (the opposite situation, where literary dialect speaks directly to the same regional identity of the reader is worthy of further thought, another day perhaps?). The result is infers difference and otherness.

If this is too difficult to grasp (especially for the mono-lingual reader), then let me try to briefly explain it in reverse. Take Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The difference in dialects of black characters, poor white and wealthy southerners, young and old is obvious even to a reader unfamiliar with them. Each dialect depicts a different identity based on race, age, location and wealth. So how do we then translate these subtle and not-so-subtle linguistic differences, replete with idioms and other expressions contemporary to the period setting? Do we go for the “meaning” approach in which we render the basic meaning of the various expressions? Do we make the language less temporally foreign and find equivalent contemporary, more now expressions in order to connect with a reader unfamiliar with the original cultural context of the novel? But in doing so, we run the risk of erasing the specific historical and cultural identities of characters and prevent their language play from ringing out clearly. Yet again, do we attempt to match the languages or literary conventions of the period and emulate them (the American south in the 1880s with Meiji era Japan)? It would appear then that dialect, however imperfect, is the way to go. Since dialects are living (though as a result of specifically targeted Meiji Era policies, many are rapidly disappearing) and effortlessly convey a sense of place, time and culture they have a function which modernisation and emulation cannot approximate. That said, we ought to take note of Hiramoto’s warning against implicit discrimination when matching dialects of different languages to convey specific meaning.

But what does all of this have to do with video games? As you may know, Japan is video game Mecca. With a few notable exceptions, global gaming culture has been undeniably shaped by Japanese language, culture, and identity. Almost every charismatic video game character is of Japanese invention. During the heyday of the original video game boom, the regional North American branch of Nintendo was responsible for both the language and cultural translation of Japanese games for the American (and in fact European and Pacific) market. Both Lvls and Legends of Localization have thoroughly dug into the peril and humor of translating games across language and culture. Nintendo of America is infamous for substituting or otherwise editing out themes and characters, especially those concerned with sexuality or the occult. Whole stories have even been retrofitted to English language versions of games, erasing their cultural specificity and updating language to what was perceived as hip at the time. Meanwhile, in the current age, voice acting has taken on a much greater role in modern games. What struck Popmatter’s Brice as odd, also rubs me the wrong way. While understandable (after all the primary market is the US) the translation from Japanese to (American) English, recalling Gone With the Wind sees a similar use of dialect and accent to represent (and marginalise) difference and otherness. In this scenario, a supposedly generic standard American accent is used to represent the American consumer and others, whether human or otherwise are spoken with different accents and dialects. This is a problem of awareness.

For a multilingual consumer, it is possible to read with nuance and affection the contours and limits of linguistic variation. Meanwhile, for the (majority) monolingual player, dialect choice runs a serious and likely risk of compounding stereotypes via unreconstructed repetition. Translation is rarely perfect, indeed there are good and bad translations. How we judge the merits of translation, like anything else is directly related to our expectations, experience and intent. For instance, as a metal head I have seen both “literal” and poetic translations of death metal lyrics. Perhaps it reveals my age in saying so, however, I prefer the poetic to the literal. If you asked me five years ago, my answer would have been the opposite, for at that time “literal” was about all I could handle and it helped consolidate my Japanese language knowledge and skills. And here we arrive at the very simple thing I wanted to say from the beginning: when we translate language and culture, how do we decide, calculate just how much complexity and difference the end user can “handle”?

Hiramoto’s 2009 article, “Slaves Speak Pseudo Toohoku-ben: The Representation of Minorities in the Japanese Translation of Gone With the Wind”, originally published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics (13/2, 249-263) can be found here.

Hang on... was that Lars Ulrich?

When I got my first internet connection at home, I was overjoyed. Can you imagine how it felt to be able to finally download that song? At a capped download rate and 56k, things took a while. I gazed with wonder at the DSL and cable connections my American friends were using on Napster, WinMX and later DC+. During that period, hundreds of individuals were singled out and faced litigation and fines. Metallica’s Lars Ulrich stood up for mega-corporate interests and aided in prosecuting illegal downloads.

These days it is possible to argue that the entire landscape of the internet has been shaped by file-sharing and illegal downloading. File-sharing, once arcane and somewhat tantalising in a naughty way is now mainstream. When reading a topic on an internet forum relating to “best” download sites, my only reply was “google”. Certainly, P2P (peer to peer) file sharing software still exists. The bit torrent method of downloading simply built on the scaffolding of earlier sharing software. However, currently, the potential pirate needs little more than browser software and a little knowledge of commonly shared file types and search parameters. File storage sites such as Mediafire, Megaupload, Fileserve, Filesonic and Rapidshare emulate the good old days of Usenet, only now with short, month long contracts and incredible download speeds.

Just today I read an article in the Australian newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald. The article proudly trumpeted the death of the torrent search site Diwana.org. What made Diwana special was its focus on Australian and New Zealand television content. From Neighbours to A Current Affair to Funniest Home Videos, from the banal to the innovative, it was all available at Diwana. If a criticism can be made of the site, it is that Diwana used and enforced a rather outdated seed/peer sharing ratio system. In some contexts, such a system works well, especially where there is a large user base and constant data traffic. However, the potential audience for Australian and New Zealand TV outside of these areas is obviously small. After all, even in Australia, many programs are available to download or stream free of charge: provided the viewer accesses these services from an Australian IP address. What this means is that potential downloaders are mostly Australians, outside of Australia and those in Australia without access to HDD/Blu-Ray recording devices. In other words a very small number. So once an uploader (seed) has lost interest in a particular file, said file becomes impossible to download.

In a move reminiscent of a late nineties, short haired Metallica, producers of ABC1’s well received drama The Slap (due for DVD release in December 2011), recently targeted and instigated a shutdown of Diwana for having Slap torrent files available for download. Naturally, one cannot help but to feel sympathy for the plight of the producers. After all, they are responsible for fronting the money required to produce a drama for TV. If their product fails to break even, let alone make a profit they will at best receive far less money for future productions and be unable to produce either follow up or new series. So congratulations and shame upon the producers for stymieing illegal downloads...

That is right. I said shame. More than anything, what there actions demonstrate is that the producers (or those in legal acting on their behalf) have a very narrow, limited concept of what the internet is and the extent of file-sharing. As the article notes, while Diwana has been shut down, the series remains widely available on any number of torrent sites. A single completed download, the creation of a torrent file and uploading that file to multiple torrent search sites can take anywhere from ten minutes to a few hours. Hey, ABC1? The cat is out of the bag. Not only is the series available on multiple torrent sites, it is also available via file storage sites. Furthermore, when the DVD is released in a few weeks (if not before as a result of employee sleight of hand thievery), it will be ripped, encoded and uploaded within minutes.

The Slap’s producers have effectively shut down one of the most important, specifically Australian oriented content sites. Although imperfect, Diwana offered humour and critique through a number of TV shows to a small number of Australians across the world. They may have prevented a single torrent file from eating into their profits but they have also gained a greater number of pirates who now not only want to see the show because of the publicity as well as those pirates who will copy and distribute out of spite. Did they adjust for these losses as well? Who can know? Lars Ulrich has entered the building.