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Now I say this:
I knew a woman who loved Ally McBeal more than my father loved Ally McBeal, or so the story goes. She had her hair cut like Callista Flockhart. She was very careful about it. I noticed the cut right away, when I first met her. Once I'd gotten to know her a bit, I learned that she'd brought a picture from a magazine into the hair salon on the day she got her Ally McBeal haircut.
This woman was twenty-seven years old. She was my English student until just six weeks ago. I had a lesson with her the day I got back from Korea. She found me through a website for finding English teachers. She needed more English, she told me, so she could pass an exam and get a license to subtitle American movies. The subtitle industry is big here in Japan -- it's the biggest in the world, in fact. More things are subtitled in this country, probably, than everywhere else in the world. Hell, they subtitle not only their own news programs (something they do in China, as well, for more prudent reasons) -- they subtitle their talk shows bigly and brightly. When someone says something funny, they put it in huge letters.
This woman needed a bilingual teacher to help her run through some scripts. Her scripts consisted of a bunch of Ally McBeal episodes. What she needed to be able to do was translate these scripts while watching the video. She needed to be able to translate a script the first time she saw it, which would be as she watched the video. She needed to be able to do this very quickly. That's how subtitlers in Japan do their jobs -- there's no other way than quickly. They're busy people.
I had three students who wanted to be subtitlers. All three were women -- women account for a great percent of the Japanese subtitling industry. All the famous subtitlers are women -- their names known, mostly, to other women who want to be subtitlers.
So what it amounts to is that I had two students who loved Ally McBeal and wanted to work in subtitles. One of them dropped me shortly before the New Year because she was getting married. She stared at a coffee spoon while she told me the news. "After I get married," she said, "I don't think we should continue meeting like this."
"'Like this,'" don't you know, implied that she was always the one getting coffee, while I made Tokyo Lemonade out of a glass of iced water, four packets of lemon juice, and six sticks of sugar (yes, that is the full recipe of "Tokyo Lemonade" -- don't ask me again, seriously). Sometimes, she gave me a piece of chocolate from a bar in her purse. She was a nice woman, and she had some pity somewhere in her that wasn't always completely welcome.
This other woman was a nice woman, too, kind of. Except this other woman was a little weirder. At the first lesson, I was waiting in a Starbucks near Ikebukuro Station, reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, as the roguish fellow that I am often does. When we got started with our introductory lesson, she mentioned my book. "I saw the movie of that -- it's got Ally McBeal in it." Ahh, so the woman was right -- Callista Flockhart had indeed played the distressed Helena in that movie adaptation. This made me a little wary right off the bat, that she would take in Shakespeare only in movie form, and only because that movie starred "Ally." Still, though, I got along mostly well with the woman.
There was one day when she wanted me to meet her in Mejiro. I did this. We met in front of the station. She then said, "Hey, why don't we have a lesson in my apartment? I have coffee, and tea, and things, there, too." She used as many commas in her speech.
So I went up to her apartment. I was carrying a 200-yen harmonica with me at the time, so I played some as we walked toward her place. She was on the sixth floor of a pink brick building with balconies arranged like tiers in Southeast Asian rice fields. When we got out of the elevator, I could hear a phone ringing somewhere on her floor. When we got to her door, I could still hear the phone ringing. We entered. The phone ringing was hers.
"Let the machine get it," she said. This woman didn't carry a cellular phone. Neither did I, for that matter. She put on a pot of hot water for tea. Soon after the tea was done, she got out a stack of scripts. We drank tea and looked over scripts while sitting on pillows on the floor. Her apartment was about the size of my current bedroom. There was nothing in the place except a television on the floor, a futon rolled up in the corner, a tiny teapot in the tiny kitchen, an empty refrigerator, a phone, and a cardboard box. The phone started ringing during our lesson. It kept ringing. Every time the machine picked up, the caller hung up, and called again. Eventually, something got to the woman, and she picked up the phone. Sitting next to me on the floor, eating a slice of an apple, she spoke:
"Hello?"
The voice on the other end was so loud, I could hear it. I just couldn't understand it. It was screaming something really urgent. It was getting dark in this woman's little apartment. It seemed darker when the person on the phone kept screaming.
The woman said "Yes" about a hundred times. In Japanese. Then she hung up the phone.
CLICK!
"I've got to go to Ikebukuro," she said. She stood up, and looked down at me. "I . . . ordered some new eyeglasses. I'm, uh, wearing contacts now, you see. That was a call from the people at the eyeglass shop. I was supposed to pick them up yesterday. I'll . . . well, it's only one stop away. Do you think you can wait here for, I don't know, twenty minutes? I'll be right back, I promise. I . . . have a television."
We were both looking at the television by this time.
"Yeah, I can wait." I didn't have anything else to do.
In a minute, this woman was one her way out. She for some reason took her raincoat with her. When she stepped out of the room and into the entryway, she tripped on something, and had to shoot out her hand to keep herself from falling into the door.
When she was gone, the place grew dark. I couldn't find a lamp, or a light switch. I groped, and turned on the television. It was some "Did you know?" science program where they asked popular comedians questions like "What would happen if you were able to fold a newspaper in half fifty times?" The answer was that, if you could fold a single sheet of newspaper in half fifty times, it'd achieve such a height that it would reach up past the moon. Of course, the newspaper can't do this, because it doesn't have enough surface area, not to mention volume.
I got bored of this show. I slid the woman's cardboard box over to my floor-cushion. I opened it up. Inside were a pink Gameboy Advance and a fat stack of cartridges. She for some reason had an American copy of Golden Sun. There was also a set of "Ally McBeal" season one DVDs. I took them out, and popped one into the DVD player embedded in the television.
I watched four episodes of the show, back to back. The first one, I watched in English. The second one, I watched in Japanese with English subtitles, and the third and fourth were in Japanese with Japanese subtitles. It really made me remember my law classes, seeing those kanji at the bottom of the screen during the courtroom scenes, as the Japanese dialogue buzzed on. I wondered, for a minute, if the woman ever watched the video this way. I take it she didn't -- and it was because of the Golden Sun cartridge in that box. I mean, really -- what a lackluster, plodding, personality-dry game. I'm sure she only bought it because it was in English, or because it was cheap. I thought, if this woman only watches these DVDs -- her only DVDs in the world, it seemed -- in English, then she definitely bought that game because it was in English. And much worse, I realized I'd never grow to actually need to use the knowledge of Japanese law I gained in those stupid college courses.
Thinking back on this event, I realize: this woman is not playing Gyakuten Saiban 3. If it were an anime, however, she would watch it. If it were a PlayStation2 game, and someone gave her a PlayStation2 for free, and she wanted to pick a game to play (as people are compelled to do when given a PlayStation2 for free), she would definitely think at least once of buying Gyakuten Saiban 3. Maybe she'd even get it, I don't know. I doubt she'd consider it too "kiddy," at any rate.
She never came back that night. After the fourth episode in that DVD set, I got up and headed home. I emailed her from an internet café in Ikebukuro. She hasn't emailed me back.
To sum up: Not everyone is going to play this game. Capcom has a sleeper hit on their hands, and that's the most they can get out of it. The advertising zeal they're displaying for a destined sleeper hit is astoundingly beautiful, and it moves me. This game, though, in the end, perfect little gem that it is, is not Pokémon; it's not a universal, addicting gameplay experience that can enslave children. As such, an English localization is so big a risk even I am advising them not to take it. The people who will like this game will like it dearly, and that's mostly something of a nice compliment. A nice compliment in a history book, however, is about the most this game can get, much as I love it so.
Recommended for: People who speak and read mostly-fluent manga-grade Japanese. Though the little animations of characters screaming and exploding wackily are fun, they do not make the game worthwhile if you don't understand everything that's going on. That's why the fansub project rally. Somebody get on this shit, I asks you.
--tim rogers
could take the bar exam tomorrow -- come on, bring that shit on
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Two main parts, one being a two-to-three-hour tutorial, the other being the more epic (yet still small-scale) quest mode. You'll love every minute of them if you can understand the language the game is in. And you'll probably . . . well, like them a lot the second time through. Just don't expect to play the game more than three times. And no, you need not have played the earlier games. Ridiculous amounts of humor.
