Unicode in Japan

Guide to a technical and psychological struggle

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This is not a final version and probably contains numerous stylistic and factual disasters. Please correct my faults!

Purpose of this Document

The purpose of this document is to provide background information for the discussion of Unicode in the context of Japanese information processing. Because this has become an emotional subject for some people, misinformation has become common and it's hard to avoid heated debates on topics like 'Why Unicode can never ever work' or 'Why Unicode is the answer to all life's problems'. Hopefully this guide can help distinguish fact from dogma -- and it could also provide useful ammunition, whatever side you want to argue on.

The purpose of this page is to provide a very simple guide to some of the grammar and constructions found in Japanese haiku, for those who can maybe bluff their way in modern Japanese on a good day but don't have the inclination to become poetry experts.

Unfortunately almost all Japanese poetry is either genuinely written in old Japanese, or looks as if it were. This guide therefore might be useful for answering questions such as:

• When it says 「歌ふ」is that the same as 「歌う」 and do I pronounce the 'h'?
• When it says 「ありけり」, is that part of the verb 'aru' or what?

This page is temporarily yanked.

This page is temporarily yanked.

Chiri Yukie

In the 19 years of her life, Chiri Yukie (知里幸恵)(1903-1922) became an important transcriber of the rapidly diminishing Ainu oral traditions.

Along with her aunt, Kannari Matsu, her younger brother, and the Japanese scholar Kindaichi Kyousuke, she was one of the first non-Westerners to attempt ot record Ainu tradition in a sympathetic light.

Her posthumously published book, Ainu Shinyoushuu(アイヌ神謡集), contains parallel Ainu and Japanese transcriptions of 13 Ainu yukar or oral epic poems.

Translation

The following is a FAQ taken from the Japanese site www.janken.com. This site flourished during the jankenpon boom of the 80's. Unfortunately it is now long dead; some pointless and trivial realtor's homepage (or something equally banal) now occupies the 'janken' domain name. How ephemeral and vain a thing is Mankind!

www.janken.com was almost the only place on the web that attempted to collect together detailed Jan Ken Pon information in a readable form. I doubt that whoever wrote the content will mind me presenting a rough translation of his work for posterity -- so here it is:

The jBrowse FAQ

Over the years, a fair few questions have been asked about jBrowse. jBrowse is no longer under active development, but it is under active use, so I am collecting a few common questions here.

Why no Opera/Mozilla/Firefox version?

This is by far the most commonly asked question about jBrowse. The answer is: it's too difficult. I agree that having jBrowse only in IE is a huge pain. I use Opera myself. But implementing jBrowse in Firefox (which is the second most widely used browser and the best understood one for plugins) is unbelievably hard.

Slug -- the unsung hero of mushi-ken

Mushi-ken (虫拳) is the oldest Japanese Rock Paper Scissors like game, and was the most popular until the advent of janken (i.e. Rock Paper Scissors) during the last century. The three 'throws' are slug, snake, and frog.

Problem

Snake beats frog in this variant, and frog beats slug. Such is the way of the jungle. This leaves us with slug beating snake, which seems silly. Why wasn't some animal that's actually capable of defeating a snake chosen?

Incorrect Explanations

Various interpretations have been put forward over the years: