Re: [tlug] [OT] What's up with online Japanese<->Japanese dictionaries?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Martin Killmann writes:

 > The sentiment you'll hear most often is "We'll rebuild it in a nicer way
 > after the next big earthquake." Tokyo was burned to the ground not once,
 > but twice in the 20th century.

Actually, there are two issues, defense (against an invasion of foot
soldiers armed with pikes, I guess -- a modern tank would just ride
over 99% of Tokyo) which is used to shut up the national-level
planners and Diet members, and property rights, which (assuming they
are customarily acknowledged, which land rights mostly are) in
practice are much stronger in Japan than in most societies.  Both
apply to Tokyo, dunno about elsewhere (remember the infamous comment
of a Diet member about the Kobe 'quake, "good thing it didn't happen
in Tokyo"?)  I don't know how seriously to take "anti-invasion", of
course, but it's a funny story.

In the Kobe 'quake case, in late March '95 I attended a conference in
Tokyo entitled "What Happened and How Did We Do?" about the 'net's
response.  The 'net kicked that disaster's ass big time.  "Heh, *I*
was designed to survive a worldwide nuclear war, you think one Richter
M6.8 earthquake is gonna bother me?"  (I'm not sure whether Japan's
present infrastructure would do anywhere near as well, though; it's
much more centralized/planned by a very few big backbone providers.  I
suspect that today the Internet would end up seriously impaired for 3
days or so the way the phone system did in '95.)

However, the keynotes were more generally about the total response,
and they were pretty dismaying.  In particular, one guy talked about
the planning response, and he said that if any buildings fall down in
the next Kobe 'quake, there's a good chance they'll block major
arterials the way they did in '95 and people will die (again) because
the ambulance will never reach them.  The reason is that already (two
months after the quake) the city planners had given up any ideas they
might have had about limiting heights and requiring greater stability
of buildings near major road, and/or widening sidewalks etc on major
arterials.  Apparently the universal attitude of Japanese real estate
owners is that public safety is as welcome as a nuclear waste dump on
their property, and there is no social force able to oppose them.  Nor
was any serious attempt made to check nationwide how many contractors
had taken the kind of shortcuts so painfully visible in the Kobe quake
(eg, garbage embedded in load-bearing concrete pillars for the
shinkansen).  (Believe it or not, there are way too few bureaucrats in
Japan to be able to do that very well, unfortunately.)

Note that the same dynamic is at the root of the Futenma Base
controversy.  That place was leveled during the war, that's why they
chose it!  What kind of idiot would issue building permits for an
elementary school in the clear zone of one of the world's busiest
airports, let alone most active military bases?  (This is not to
defend the *presence* of that base, merely to note that until very
recently, no serious politician questioned whether that base would
remain more or less where it is indefinitely.)  But that's where that
school had historically been so that's where they rebuilt it. :-(

 > And after that, during the period of high economic growth,
 > everybody was striving for modern convenience, nobody cared about
 > what the result looks like.

I have to contest that.  Whatever else I may say about my urban/
regional planning colleagues, there is no question that they care
about aesthetics.  Many people do, including the planning bureaucrats.
The problem (as usual) is a lack of political will sufficient to
overcome the vested interests of a relatively small segment of
society.  Ones who are wealthy enough to enjoy the beautiful gardens
*within* the 5m high hedge around their 72 tsubos, and the spectacular
view of the Imperial Palace from 57th floor offices in Marunouchi....

 > I do think modern Japanese people appreciate traditional Japanese
 > aesthetics a lot, it's just that it has been confined to old temples,
 > gardens, or ryokan, or traditional crafts. Nobody expected them in city
 > planning, or website design...

I don't think it's that simple.  More precisely, as explained above I
think I know what's happening in Japanese city planning, but I don't
understand the website issue.  First, there aren't the same kind of
external effects, so regulatory failure isn't in question.  Second,
appealing to aesthetics is an obvious strategy, and it took American
web designers only 2 or 3 years to weed out the most self-centered and
tasteless.  (I'd like to say that's 'cause the Italians showed them
how, but I suspect it ain't so.)  The basic principles were already
apparent by around 2001 (even Jamie Zawinski felt a need to comment
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/design.html), and dramatic improvements in
technology allowed even Jamie to get into the act (http://www.jwz.org).
Grumpy old hackers aside, by then people really were getting web
design, and a lot of it was pushed by (gently now) the needs of
commercial sites trying to *sell* something.  And the need to make
good design maintainable pushed better web standards hard (grumpy old
hackers http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/markup.html notwithstanding).

Somehow the process doesn't seem to work the same way here.  I show
people *CSS Zen Garden* and they say "wow" but there doesn't seem to
be any desire to do the same (not even in the hypothetical "if the U
would pay for it" sense).  Obviously, I don't get something, but what?

 > Which leads us back to topic somewhat, because Japanese software
 > interfaces are just as crappy as their websites.
 > (Counterexamples welcome)

Now that's an interesting point, because there are both similarities
and differences between WUI design and GUI design.  However, since I
abandoned Ichitaro in 1991 :-), I have used exactly one Japanese-built
workstation UI.  (Of course I use Japanese UIs, but they're all
designed and implemented in San Jose, then localized to Japanese.)  I
must say the various WUIs I have to use (for entering grades, for
tracking/spending my research budget, and for applying for government
grants) are hideously bad compared to the versions that even the
Banana Slugs (UC Santa Cruz) get to use.  And for doing research,
well, the comparison between

    http://www.e-stat.go.jp/

and

    http://www.bea.gov/

has been known to cause Japanese undergraduates to weep.  If
workstation-based UIs are anywhere near as bad ....

Ah well, time to go hear about whether there really are tech
spillovers from FDI.