No slur on the Japanese, here; none at all. They are good, creative, hard working people, with a rich national identity and great sense of Business all over the World. However…
I was looking through eBay for some World War II model sets: ships, planes, whatever. After a while it finally occurred to me that kits I was seeing were all made for Japanese consumption(1), printed in Japanese on the box (usually English also — not always), the manuals are often in Japanese only.
Just an example. (And, yeah — it’s an Italian cruiser, so it’s the other Theatre of War and not the pacific at all. I do things like that.) I’m grateful that anybody still makes this stuff, that some where in the world are people who still like crafting models from kits.
I was specifically looking for a Fletcher-class destroyer kit (for a client of mine — never mind), one of which was featured prominently in the classic John Wayne movie In Harm’s Way. The only ones I could find were in Japanese. (Apparently there are no American-made model kits any more? Can that be right?(2)).
That’s ironic, to say the least(3).
The very least.
I’m kind of liking the 21st Century as it gets along; tremendous material for Stand-Up Routines everywhere I look. Or maybe it’s “Earth – the Sit-Com” as seen on the Milky-Way Galactic TV Network. (Wonder what they have for commercials?)
NOTE: Again, no slur on the Japanese people. WWII was a long time ago and things all over the world have changed beyond change since. Nor is there a nation on the planet that hasn’t made fabulous blunders (“he who is without sin, let him cast the first stone” yes?) I just couldn’t not share this incredible irony once it dawned on me.
NOTE-NOTE: the Japanese characters in the title are what Google Translate gave me for irony, “hango,” anglicized. So if it’s not correct, blame Google Translate(4).
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(1) Actually, I think one or two of them might have been of Chinese manufacture: I have a hard time distinguishing Japanese text from Chinese. One of these days I need to study a bit of both. I mean, Mandarin is the number 1 most spoken language on the planet. How can you be from Earth and not speak the #1 language there? BTW: Spanish is the 2nd most common language, then comes English, followed closely by Hindi. If you spoke all four of those, you’d still only be able to speak to about 2.5 billion people… out of 7.5 billion!!
(2) Research suggests Revell kits (for instance) are now made in Germany, with an HQ in Wales (?), but the majority of WWII related kits were not Revell up on eBay, but clearly Japanese companies.
(3) In case you’re not catching the irony, In Harm’s Way was concerned with the conflict in the Pacific, between the what was left of the American fleet after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the superior-in-numbers Japanese Imperial Navy. So… now Japan is the “only” maker of model kits for the American ships? What would you call that if not irony?
(4) And, by the way, that is precisely why increasing numbers of instruction sheets and websites appear in broken English (and, presumably, broken whatever-other-languages). Because the material was written once in one language and then translated by software apparently without human or bilingual oversight into all other target languages. That is, the automation layer is allowed to do a job so poor and sloppy that if it was an actual employee who had done that he would have been fired. Yet those results are what now passes for “good enough.” The software that does such translations has a very, very long way to go before I would even release it on the market — and I speak as a long time software engineer, so there. It works badly, gets things wrong, sometimes the results are completely unintelligible, yet there it is, in use. Bad. Very bad. What ever became of Professional Pride?