Made it to level 48!
It took almost fifteen days, and it has honestly been a terrible past couple weeks for me, but weirdly enough, I’m coming out of it more committed than ever to studying Japanese? Basically, I did not get the job I applied for, so my part time position at the library will be ending after December, and the whole experience is causing me to rethink a lot of things about my career, and I guess reevaluate what I’m doing with my life .
(Depressing job stuff)
A lot of my expertise is in book preservation, and I found out the hard way that being a preservation librarian doesn’t exactly make you the most popular person at work . I sort of lost my job (or at least they decided not to hire me for the full-time position) because I tried to insist that our library follow proper protocol when dealing with mold and that we have a disaster plan for situations like that, and my boss did NOT want to hear it.
I also pushed for improving the ventilation in our building and installing Corsi-Rosenthal box filters to help compensate for the wildfire smoke and increased spread (and severity) of respiratory diseases, and this also put me on my boss’s bad side. But I couldn’t compromise on my professional ethics, and I had to do what I could to protect our students and the other staff (as well as the library collection), so I had to try to fight for this while I was here.
Entry level librarian jobs are few and far between, and they’re really competitive, even if you have a master’s degree and experience. This job was really my best shot at career stability, and not getting it will set me back years, unfortunately.
Long story short, I think I might be giving up on libraries? If I’m just going to fail at my backup career, I might as well fail at the career I actually want, which is writing. I’m planning on spending the next year or so hardcore studying Japanese and working on getting better at translation (and ideally trying to get back into writing as well…). I’d like to publish my own books, but I’m increasingly open to getting into translation professionally, too.
I’m not sure I’ll ever get the chance to translate wrestling stuff for pay, but, well, as I’ve recently learned, never say never . One of my friends actually has started to receive offers for paid translation work thanks to the publicity from her free translations, including getting paid by a Japanese media company to officially translate a series of interviews they’re publishing.
I’m solidly at least a couple years away from being at a level where I’d feel comfortable doing translation work for money, though. I’m still heavily reliant on rodan’s help with the TJPW translations . But it’s absolutely a skill you improve at with experience, so I’m sure I’ll get there eventually.
I’d say that it’s still probably unlikely I’d get a paying job translating wrestling, but I have been thinking more about trying to eventually find work translating like short stories and novels and such. I am a short story and novel writer in English, after all, so I have the writing chops on the English side, and if I continue to improve my translation skills (and just Japanese skill in general), hopefully I’ll eventually get to a point where I’m capable of faithfully translating someone else’s fiction work into English. Maybe I could even do senryu, haha!
It also occurred to me that I could look into translating Japanese papermaking stuff into English, since the papermaking field is pretty small, and I don’t think there are many people who have papermaking expertise who are also capable of doing Japanese-English translation. There certainly would be a lot of demand for it on the English-speaking side, because the entire field of modern book conservation heavily relies on Japanese paper. But I don’t know if there would be money in that, haha . I do have some connections to some pretty big names in the field, though, so I’m thinking of reaching out to some of my old professors in a few years (assuming I’m able to reach an advanced level of Japanese) and seeing if they’d be interested in helping make this happen.
In more positive news, I finished my October drawing challenge, and National Novel Writing Month has been going smoothly so far! I was really worried about it with how depressed I was at the end of last month, but I’ve sort of just been funneling my job despair into enthusiasm for the work that actually gives me joy, which is writing and studying Japanese.
My burned item count as of the beginning of this level: 4467 (and 3264 in KW!)
Fun encounters with Japanese outside of WaniKani:
Don’t really have much to talk about here this level, at least nothing really worth mentioning. I did get the chance to practice some listening immersion during TJPW’s October 24 show for Wrestle Universe subscribers, which was a pretty wacky show as always. I didn’t have a transcript for it, so I didn’t do a translation for this show, and I relied pretty heavily on an English language recap from another fan, but I still picked up on a few things.
One of the matches was a 人狼ゲーム4WAYマッチ (Werewolf Game 4-Way Match), which was exactly what it says on the tin. The wrestlers all got assigned a role (three were citizens and one was the werewolf), and if the citizens pinned the werewolf, they won, but if two of the citizens got pinned, the werewolf won. I heard the WK word 人狼 many times, haha, because the wrestlers spent most of the match arguing over who was the werewolf.
I talked about some other fun bits of this show in this post.
A highlight from the past week is that NJPW wrestler Katsuyori Shibata came to AEW to challenge Orange Cassidy for the All Atlantic Championship in one of the most absurd dream matches of all time. Most of Shibata’s career was well before my time, since he got injured in 2017 and basically had to retire, but he came back to do an exhibition match with Zack Sabre Jr. in 2021, and then he had a proper match with Ren Narita (whom he trained) at Wrestle Kingdom in January this year. I actually saw that match because I was still watching NJPW at the time. I hadn’t heard much about what Shibata had done since then, though, due to no longer following the company, so I was very shocked to find out that this match against Orange was going to be his third match since returning.
Apparently Shibata specifically wanted to fight Orange Cassidy, of all wrestlers (the other AEW wrestler he wanted to fight was Bryan Danielson). This fact made a lot of fans very angry because of Orange’s gimmick, which is that he’s very lazy and doesn’t like to wrestle if he can avoid it. Some fans think that he’s making a mockery of the entire sport and that he’s going to turn casual fans away in droves because of it. But from my experience, non-wrestling fans LOVE Orange Cassidy and prefer watching him to other wrestlers because he’s extremely entertaining and his matches are really funny. He’s actually my mom’s favorite wrestler because she likes watching him even though she doesn’t like wrestling.
Shibata’s gimmick is just about as opposite as you can get from Orange Cassidy. He’s very serious about what he does, and he fights super stiff, and his nickname is simply “The Wrestler”. Despite not wrestling for years, he’s still very beloved by fans all over the world, especially in Japan, but in the US, too.
Orange Cassidy vs Shibata was an utter delight. Orange did his own version of several of Shibata’s moves, which was funny, and Shibata did some of Orange’s usual spots, which was even funnier. It was a perfect combination of what makes both of those guys so good.
My mom actually wanted to watch this match with me, because I told her about Shibata and got her interested. When their entrances played, she was like, “Oh, this almost gives me chills! I see why you like this so much.” She’d never even seen Shibata before, but just seeing him enter, she felt the gravity of that moment, and it was so cool to me that that had been conveyed.
Japanese and English-speaking fans alike were moved by it. I saw a blog post from a fan translator who translated a lot of reactions from English-speaking fans into Japanese so that the Japanese fans could see how beloved Shibata was among the English-speaking fanbase, too.
AEW does these kinds of matches so well. I think it’s really their strongest forte as a company, that they can offer this kind of stage for things like this. Sometimes I just think about all of the immense history and unique cultural context behind all of the many different pieces that make up the world of pro wrestling, and how it has these moments where somehow it all comes together and all of these disparate parts are universally understood and appreciated, and I get so overwhelmed with emotion.
On a note that isn’t specifically Japanese related, but it’s related to topics commonly talked about on my study log, haha, it looks like AEW finished up their investigation of the whole CM Punk/Elite mess. From what is being reported, it seems unlikely that CM Punk will be staying with the company. The Elite seem to be on their way back, though. They at least made it back onto AEW programming, albeit in a few very cryptic video packages wherein they are basically being erased from AEW’s history. It’s one of those interesting wrestling things where the storyline is mirroring basically what was happening in real life (AEW didn’t even wish Kenny happy birthday while he was suspended…). I’m curious to see how it’s all going to resolve in storyline, since it looks like a real-life reconciliation between the three of them and Punk is going to be impossible. I’m anxious to see Kenny back in particular, especially since I’ve been waiting all this time for him to finally wrestle in DDT again…
On the other half of the Golden Lovers’ side, judging from his recent tweets, it looks like Kota Ibushi is going to be waiting out his NJPW contract, and he’s also still waiting for his shoulder to heal. He still has plans to bring about a revolution in the industry, though.
In sort of related news, I really hope that twitter doesn’t go under because there is simply no replacement for it that is used so widely all over the world, and it devastates me to think about what would happen to the global wrestling community without it. On twitter, we regularly have English-speaking, Japanese-speaking, and Spanish-speaking fans, companies, and wrestlers all interacting with each other and sharing in the collective storytelling that is this weird as heck medium, and I don’t want everyone to splinter off to separate sites in different languages. It just feels like so much cultural exchange would be lost, and that’s heartbreaking to me.
So I’m hoping for the best, but I’m trying to prepare myself mentally for the worst…
みんなの日本語 Lesson 43 – Lesson 44
I don’t know if I really have anything to report on from lesson 43, or the lesson 44 vocab? I’m still trucking along! One thing I am looking forward to when I get to Tobira is the increase in reading exercises, because my favorite MNN exercises tend to be the reading exercise at the very end of the chapter. Tobira seems to have a lot more of this type of exercise.
I updated the MNN kanji by WK level spreadsheet with the lesson 44 kanji!
Reading/Listening:
Spanish (Reading: Antes de Ser Libres)
I am very, very close to finishing the book! I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to read next, though, because I’m going to be losing access to the library’s collection of Spanish books when I’m no longer working here. I’m going to look for one that is a shorter/easier read, I think, to finish out the month. Then I’ll be on my own again and will have to rely on my own collection… I guess it might be a good time to try reading some of the harder books I have again? I’ve probably improved enough to make them at least a little easier.
I’m still keeping up with the read every day challenge in both Spanish and Japanese! Had a bit of a rough patch when I was most depressed over the job stuff, but even then, I read at least a little every day.
I also managed to read half of chapter six of volume three of 大海原と大海原 during a lull in my translation work. I’m going to try to stay caught up on the translations so that I can hopefully get a bit more of the manga read.
I finished three TJPW show translations:
2022.10.14 TJPW 夢プロレス-dream on the ring- — (17 words added)
2022.10.21 TJPW CITY CIRCUIT AUTUMN~遠藤有栖地元凱旋興行~ — (7 words added)
2022.10.29 TJPW The Mountain top 2022 — (9 words added)
A stranger on twitter made a meme based on my last translation, which was a new experience for me! Naturally the meme got far more likes than the actual translation that I (and rodan) put so much work into, but that’s just how it goes .
As I said last time, I added no new cards to my circulating Anki deck! The cards that I added from these shows will get added to my main deck eventually, though. My workflow is probably going to shift after December, because I’m going to find myself with suddenly a lot more free time, but I’m not quite sure what that will look like yet.
New resources:
None, I don’t think? Sorry!
Next steps:
I’m buckling down for another couple weeks of NaNoWriMo, continuing my conversational Spanish class, doing the TJPW translations, keeping up with the read every day challenge, and trying to survive an increasingly awkward and depressing work environment .
Telling myself that there are better things on the horizon, so I just have to focus on getting through these next couple of months, and then I’ll be able to relax.
Onward to level 49! 行くぞ!