Section 08 Entry 0001. 2003 February 08 Saturday.
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Today's new toy is an Internet site which will translate this site (or any site) into Japanese.

This translation service is funded by advertizing, so you end up with a bunch of ads at the top of the page, which get regularly refreshed. The translation is apparently done by a computer on the fly, and it's pretty rudimentary. It can also be fairly slow - be prepared to do a little waiting.

Once the translating-into-Japanese site has grabbed you, you need to do a little bit of work to escape from its grip. There are three obvious methods:-

1. Close down the browser and start it up again.

2. Hit the BACK button however many times it takes to get back to the world of English ... however, this doesn't always seem to work.

3. Enter an URL in the address bar and then hit ENTER (for example, www.ibm.com or something like that).

And, rather than type in an URL, you also have the option of copying and pasting an URL, which we will get to below.

The site which is responsible for this computer-based translation service is called www.excite.co.jp, and in case you want to investigate the site I've put a link to it here ....

If for some reason you want to launch the www.excite.co.jp site itself then go ahead - note that this is in Japanese and you will need to be using a browser that has Japanese enabled in order to be able to see Japanese on the screen.

However, the link above is just for your information. We'll get to the bit about launching translation into Japanese down below.

If you start using the www.excite.co.jp computer translation service and you then want to escape from it, you can launch this website in English by copying the URL below and pasting it into the address bar then hitting ENTER:-

http://zenvirus.com/

(If you think you might want to do that some time in the next couple of minutes then you could highlight the text now, and copy it, so it is ready to paste into the address bar when needed.)

Now if you want to launch this website in computer-translated Japanese courtesy of the www.excite.co.jp site:-

http://www.excite.co.jp/world/url/?wb_url=../index.html

Warning!! This is VERY BAD computer translation Japanese! On my site there is the name of a city called "Oolong Morblock". The computer didn't know what to make of that, so it left the "Morblock" in the original English and translated "Oolong" into Japanese as "Oolong tea" to make "Oolong Tea Morblock".

Now here is Google news in English ... http://news.google.com ... once again, if you highlight the URL and copy it, then you can get Google news in English by pasting the URL into the address bar and hitting ENTER, economically escaping from the world of computer-translated Japanese.

And below is the link for Google news in Japanese, although, once again, remember this is not authentic Japanese but, rather, a computer's primitive version of the real thing ... you are going to need to have Japanese enabled in your browser to actually see Japanese ....

http://www.excite.co.jp/world/url/?wb_url=http://news.google.com

Okay, and so now you're asking, "Well, who needs a computer translation of stuff into Japanese?" Apart from Japanese people who do not see the Internet as a wonderful opportunity to really brush up their English ....

Well, one group of people who might be interested is people like me who are learning Japanese ... it might be handy to be able to read something in English then read the same thing in Japanese, or vice versa.

I've been cruising around this site in Japanese mode, and I've personally found it instructive.

So that's today's new toy.

I haven't yet figured out how to use the www.excite.co.jp site to start the translation service ... I assume there's a simple way to do this, but my Japanese is really weak and I haven't had time to experiment with the site.

But obviously you can make your own translation link to whatever site you want to launch by using one of the links above as a template, and just making whatever modification you want.

For example, if you wanted to launch the English-language site http://www.ibm.com and have it translated into Japanese by the www.excite.co.jp site, you could make this link:-

http://www.excite.co.jp/world/url/?wb_url=http://www.ibm.com

(On my hard drive I have a page of useful links, and my browser uses this as the home page when it starts up ... if I wanted to make a link that would allow me to have something translated into Japanese, that is where I personally would put my link.)

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Section 08 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 February 09 Sunday.
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Now the first faint rumors of spring are in the air. The Season of Suffering is at hand, and, all over the Tokyo-Yokohama area, millions of people are awaiting the Affliction with dread.

Soon, for many of the millions, to breathe will be a torment. To keep their very eyes open will be a battle with pain. Their sleep will be restless, fatigue battling against the provocations of the fallout, against the unstoppable onslaught of at enemy operating at the nanotechnological end of the scale.

They sufferers are already wearing surgical masks. They are digging the air-filtering machines out of cupboards and are starting to filter the air. They are hoping that by using masks and air filters, by shaking clothing before coming inside, and by keeping the windows closed, they can somehow protect themselves from the hideous dust, from the fine-milled fallout from the millions and millions of cedar trees in the hills near the urban area.

So now you're thinking "Anticlimax, anticlimax!" But this is a serious problem. So serious, in fact, that the authorities have installed monitoring equipment, and it is possible to get alerted (by cellphone, I think, or perhaps via the Internet - to be honest I don't know the details) when a particularly bad cloud of pollen is heading in your direction.

What good these alerts are supposed to do I have no idea, since the average Japanese salaryman can't really tell the boss, "Sorry, but I have to flee the fallout, now." If you're stuck in the office then you're stuck in the office, regardless of how badly polluted the local environment happens to be.

One index of the seriousness of this problem is that students have repeatedly asked me "What does kafun mean in English?" The answer is that "kafun" (literally "flower excrement") means pollen, and that "kafunbyo" (terminating in a long "o") means "hayfever".

On quite a few occasions, for quite a few people, hayfever becomes Topic Number One, and students want to talk about it because they're suffering from it, or their spouses are suffering from it, or the people at work are suffering from it.

The whole kafunbyo phenomenon is starting to get into gear just about now, and it will swiftly get worse and worse. It should have pretty much tapered off by the time the Golden Week holiday arrives in early May, but, even so, we're talking about quite a chunk of the year being disfigured by this affliction.

So far, I haven't suffered from hayfever myself, or at least not to any serious degree. Last year there were a couple of days on which I found my eyes and nose watering, but perhaps this was just a psychosomatic reaction, provoked by all the sufferers around me.

My understanding of allergic reactions like hayfever is primitive, but I am under the impression that living in a heavily polluted environment increases your vulnerability to allergies. It seems (at least, this is my understanding, but don't quote me on this) that the more chemicals you get exposed to, the more likely your body is to play up and develop some kind of fierce allergy.

Since I am, in many ways, a child of the Cold War, the whole kafun phenomenon reminds me of nuclear fallout, something the optimists said you could escape (more or less) by closing the windows and hiding inside.

Considering the way that the cedar pollen infiltrates urban living spaces, I'm pessimistic about anyone's chances of escaping the effects of any toxic dust in the environment. If there's some kind of fine-milled toxin in the air (perhaps because the friendly White Knights to the Rescue service has been shelling local outcroppings of the Axis of Evil with artillery shells packed with depleted uranium) then you're going to end up breathing this stuff.

That's it for today, I think, except for one small piece of advice, today's addition to the world's stockpile of wisdom:

Small women should not try to carry large elephants.

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