In Japanese, the word for “part-time job” is arubaito, which comes from the German word for “work,” arbeit. Arubaito is often shortened to baito. There’s a Japanese PSP game called “Beit Heller 2000,” which apparently includes a minigame called “Ballpoint Factory.”
This guy has figured out an ingenious method of getting the high score:
Click the image to view the full series of hilarious pictures. Thanks to mumu for finding this!
(Yes, this is LEGO-related!)
Ask and ye shall receive! In my recent post on the alternate Exo-Force design by anime director and mecha designer Shoji Kawamori, I asked if any Japanese LEGO fans knew of any better pictures of a completed Van Force mecha.
Azumu (of LEGO-BINGO, who it seems is much more consistent about checking Brickshelf than I am) responded:
Regarding instructions for Kawamura-sensei’s “Van Force,” gabriel-san customized the model a bit and uploaded them:
http://brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=161353
There were a few places in the magazine that were hard to figure out, so it’s not a complete recreation, but I think it’s pretty much complete.
Thanks Azumu-san! So without further ado, here’s a bigger picture of Van Force:
Click the image (or the link Azumu-san provided) for the full gallery, complete with step-by-step building instructions! Awesome.
Oh, and those aren’t custom decals. Japanese LEGO specialty store Click-Brick handed out Van Force sticker sheets with the purchase of any Exo-Force set. Since The LEGO Company worked with Mr. Kawamori to design Van Force, I believe the sticker sheet is “official.”
The name Nelson Yrizarry should be familar to regular readers of VignetteBricks and LUGNET (as well as The Brothers Brick). He and his brother Patrick are well-respected members of the LEGO community, and their creations are admired by LEGO fans everywhere. One of Nelson’s latest vignettes features a distinctly Japanese theme — the Hina Matsuri or Girls’ Day Festival.
Here’s what Nelson has to say:
In this MOC, a family gathers to celebrate the day with the pounding of mochi (rice cakes) in the traditional style – hammering it inside a large stone bowl. For those who have never seen this before, one person wets their hands and reaches into the bowl between hammer blows to fold the mochi over – timing is crucial! Everyone else helps to roll the mochi into smaller pieces.
A hina-ningyo doll is on display inside the house, along with something else… Don’t forget to enjoy the cherry blossoms!
Click the image to see the full gallery.
Today we’ll wrap up translations of Izzo’s series of Japanese proverb vignettes. I’ve said before that he’s presenting them in hiragana order, which means he created a LEGO vignette for each kana character in the Japanese syllabic alphabet. Some of you may be expecting 50 vignettes, but there are only 44. Let’s have one last Japanese lesson to explain why.
The Japanese alphabet, or Gojuon, is represented in two scripts (or kana), hiragana and katakana. Goju means “fifty,” and on means sound, implying that there are fifty kana in the Gojuon. Children memorize the Gojuon in tables. There are ten columns of five kana each. The first column contains the vowels; the next nine contain consonants combined with those vowels (plus an N sound in its own eleventh column that nobody counts). However, the “Ya” column includes two duplicate vowels, and the “Wa” column includes another duplicate vowel, two archaic kana (unused in modern writing), and the vowel “Wo” that never begins a word. Thus 44 instead of 50.
(Now combine hiragana with their corresponding katakana forms, Latin letters and numbers, and nearly 2,000 Kanji characters derived from Chinese — each with multiple possible readings depending on context, and you get an idea of how complex the Japanese written language is.)
Now, on to the final batch of Izzo’s vignettes:
Japanese: The seed of pleasure is pain; the seed of pain is pleasure.
English: No pain, no gain.
Japanese: A flower in each hand.
English: Have one’s bread buttered on both sides.
Japanese/English: Like attracts like.
Japanese/English: There’s an exception to every rule.
Japanese: Evidence instead of discourse.
English: The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Japanese/English: Fortune enters by a merry gate.
Izzo has finished his sequence of Japanese proverb vignettes. Now Bruce and I just need to catch up!
So let’s get cracking!
Japanese/Japanese: Fine feathers make fine birds.
Japanese: The mummy thief becomes a mummy.
English: Go for wool and come home shorn.
Japanese: The pestle handle I took hold of in the past.
English: Skills you learn as a young man don’t wane as you grow older.
Japanese/English: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
Japanese: A sword returns to its sheath.
English: To kiss and make up.
Japanese/English: Penny-wise, pound-foolish.
Japanese: Carelessness is the greatest enemy.
English: Danger comes when you least expect it.
Japanese/English: The biggest trees give the most shelter.
Although Japan officially celebrates New Year’s Day on January 1st, until 1873 Japan followed the lunar calendar used by China, Korea, Vietnam, and many other Asian countries. The Japanese calendar is still full of many holidays that mark various important dates in the traditional lunar calendar.
One such holiday, Setsubun, is celebrated each year on February 3. In the past, Setsubun represented the last day of the winter months and the beginning of spring. Celebrating Setsubun involves the usual Shinto shrine visits, but you also toss toasted beans out your door and yell “Out with demons [oni]! In with happiness!” Pretty fun when everybody on your street is doing it!
To honor Setsubun, a couple of Japanese builders have posted really cool creations.
First up, mumu chases an oni away with handfuls of round 1×1 tan plates (I’m really diggin’ the giant oni head):
And PPB hero Izzo offers his take on the same scene:
(These builders’ awesome oni make my own no-face oni look pretty silly.)
Japanese LEGO blogger Sumi-Handy posts his own LEGO creations, along with those of his kids. He recently posted a kago (which means “box”), an enclosed sedan chair in which important people were carried around during the Edo period (1603-1867):
The sedan chair is by Sumi-Handy’s son, but what struck me about this creation is the fantastic cedar tree Sumi-Handy himself added in the background. Very, very nice!
I was honestly a bit disappointed that the New Year’s LEGO creations by Japanese builders didn’t include any mochi-pounding scenes. A really fun New Year’s tradition I remember is to make hand-made mochi (rice cakes). You put a special type of sticky rice in a wooden pestle and literally pound it with a giant wooden mallet. It’s pretty awesome.
Thankfully, mumu’s wife has built a cute little mochi-pounding scene, complete with the mochi-pounding rabbit from the Moon*:
*Where westerners see a face in the Moon, Japanese people see a rabbit pounding mochi.
As regular readers of Pan-Pacific Bricks and VignetteBricks already know, Izzo has been posting LEGO vignettes based on Japanese proverbs. So far, Izzo has posted 30 vignettes on his Web site and in two Brickshelf galleries. I’ve translated the first twenty, and am genuinely looking forward to the next thirty. How do I know there are going to be thirty more? Izzo is posting the proverb vignettes in hiragana order, and there are approximately fifty hiragana characters.
So let’s get started with the next ten, shall we? :-)
Japanese: A bee to a crying face.
English: Misfortunes never come alone. / When it rains, it pours.
Japanese/English: He who runs after two hares will catch neither.
Japanese: Millet with wet hands.
English:Like taking candy from a baby. / Easy money.
Japanese: Wearing a cat.
English: A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Japanese/English: There’s luck in leftovers. (“Luck” sounds the same as “clothing,” so there’s a pun in this one as well.)
Japanese: Dumplings rather than flowers.
English: Function before form. / Better fill a man’s belly than his eye.
Japanese: Beauty and luck seldom go together.
English: The fairest flowers soonest fade.
Japanese/English: Candle in the wind. (To have one’s life hang by a thread.)
Japanese/English: He that shoots oft, at last shall hit the mark.
Japanese: If you’re in love, travelling a thousand miles seems like only one mile.
English: Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Bruce has posted again that Izzo has posted another batch of Japanese proverb vignettes in his gallery.
Here we go…
Japanese: Strategem 36: If all else fails, run away.
English: He that fights and runs away lives to see another day.
Japanese/English: Dead men tell no tales.
Japanese: When one god deserts you, another one picks you up.
English: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Japanese/English: Good and quickly seldom meet.
(It’s a fast-food noodle stand. Not exactly gourmet cooking.)
Japanese: Providing is preventing.
English: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
(In other words, always be prepared. Thus the Swiss Army robot.)
Japanese: A bird taking flight does not pollute the place it left.
English: It is an ill bird that fouls its own nest.
Japanese: Even dust piled up will make a mountain.
English: Many a little makes a mickle.
Japanese: The moon and a soft-shell turtle.
English: As different as night and day.
Japanese/English: The nail which sticks out gets hammered down.
Japanese/English: A near neighbour is better than a far-dwelling kinsman.
As before, check out Izzo’s if you want to see Flash versions that include the original Japanese text.
I debated whether to post my latest minifigure over on my minifig-themed blog, but it does require a bit of explanation, so I’ll post it here instead.
Kappa are mythical water imps from Japan. Kappa inhabit lakes, ponds, streams, and other bodies of water. If you do a little research, you’ll find that kappa are associated with some pretty nasty legends. For example, they drag people into the water and eat them.
Their favorite food is cucumbers, which is apparently why cucumber rolls are called “kappa maki.” Long ago, parents would sometimes carve their child’s name into a cucumber and toss the vegetable into water in an attempt to prevent kappa from stealing the child. Generally, though, kappa are considered mischievous creatures today. Here’s a more contemporary, “cutified” kappa:
I just saw that Bruce posted about a new set of vignettes by Izzo (whose New Year’s creations I posted about earlier this month). Quoth Bruce: “Hopefully Dunechaser will be able to shed some enlightenment via his Pan-Pacific Bricks blog.” Well sir, I shall give it my best shot.
Here’s what I’ll do. The vignettes won’t make sense unless you understand exactly what the Japanese proverbs say, but you still might not get what the proverbs actually mean, so I’ll try to find a corresponding English proverb or provide a brief explanation.
Japanese: By hiding your head you expose your butt.
English: Burying your head in the sand.
Japanese: Even a one-sun bug has a five-bu soul.
(Sun and bu are units of length that are no longer used in Japan, where the Metric system is used instead. There are ten sun in one bu, so this proverb is saying that even a little bug has a big soul.)
English: Tread on a worm and it will turn.
Japanese: If you gossip about someone, their shadow will appear.
English: Speak of the devil (and he’s sure to appear).
Japanese/English: A drowning man will clutch at a straw.
Japanese: To gain one of your nine lives back.
English: To have a narrow escape from death.
Japanese: The son of a frog will be a frog.
English: Like father like son.
Japanese: Prayers to God in difficult times.
English: Danger past, God forgotten.
Japanese/English: Art is long, life is short.
Latin*: Ars longa, vita brevis. *Bonus language!!!
Japanese: Unless you enter the tiger’s den, you can’t steal her cubs.
English: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Note: I used Izzo’s site to determine which proverbs go with the vignettes in his Brickshelf gallery, but I couldn’t find this one, so I’m not sure what the proverb is. Sorry folks!
