Not much to note this week, though (haha) one of the notes is a real doozy. They stay where they are this chapter.
Page 58, Sakaide is located here. I went googling for ぴっぴ飯, and coincidentally enough, the very first result that came up was a list of Ｂ級グルメ from Kagawa. Recipe.
Page 76, the doozy
This chapter was released a couple of months after the Japanese government announced they were changing the official romanisation standards to match the common practice of using Hepburn romanisation on signage (the previous government standard was Kunrei-shiki, though most organisations were already using Hepburn), so I’d thought for a while that this Gunma/Gumma conversation was related to that. In actual fact, however, it turns out that it’s a much older issue - both are Hepburn (though it’s “Gunma” in Kunrei-shiki anyway), it’s just that “Gumma” is traditional Hepburn while “Gunma” is revised Hepburn, and the question entirely comes down to which standard different companies followed at the time.
Railway companies like JR East or Tokyo Metro followed a standard which was basically “generally revised Hepburn except ん is romanised as per traditional”, while the department that produces road signs (MLIT? I’m not sure) followed “generally revised Hepburn except that macrons are omitted from vowels”. For the topical example, here is a road sign pointing to “Gunmasoja Station”, while here is the sign board on “Gumma-Sōja Station” itself.
The confusion even got to a point where the prefectural government released an official letter in English that citizens could display to foreign organisations to clarify that “Gunma” and “Gumma” on official documents (such as passports, which usually read “Gumma”) refer to the same location.
I also found this article, which (despite the headline) mostly focuses on the specific example of Nihonbashi/Nihombashi in Tokyo (though there is a section at the bottom about Gunma). The article’s almost exactly nine years old (just three days until its birthday, as I post this), so it definitely predates last year’s announcement by a bit.
Now whether this situation will actually change now that the government has settled on Hepburn as the standard… remains to be seen.
Either way, Googling hasn’t told me what to do if I ever come across a Gummma…
Page 77, the horror movie twist is one thing, but how on earth did Ema manage to dream up those two random guys having the soap-opera conversation back on page 72?