New Reference Book

[Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow]

This may be beating a dead horse, but...

>Release dates are indicated here, not copyright date.  A problem arises with 
>films whose release has been significantly delayed.  "They Who Step on a 
>Tiger's Tail" gets a 1950s release, not 1945.  "After Life" is 1999, not 
>1998.  But what to do with films which have yet to receive a theatrical 
>release?  For example, Kobayashi Masaki's "Bootleg Film" which screened in 
>TIFF 98 and Cannes 99.  And unless I somehow missed it, Tsukamoto's 1998 
>"BULLET BALLET" doesn't seem to have a commercial release yet.  Presumably, 
>an asterix can indicate the first festival date as a temporary measure?  Any 
>other suggestions.  And of course, experimental films, documentaries, etc, 
>have all kinds of problems in ascertaining a "release" date: short films 
>tend to eventually get released in a compilation programme of the director's 
>work, the date of which tells you very little about the development of the 
>work.  Where listed, OV's are listed by the video release date (of course).  
>Don't mention "Kamikaze Taxi" (or "Fried Dragon Fish").

I still think release date in the theaters should be given preference for 
a text that covers the entirety of Japanese film.  Copyright date and/or 
production date should be included if there is a significant difference 
(more than a year).  Production/copyright date should be given for 
unreleased films, with a note it has not been released.

>2. Kanji Title
>
>There are some punctuation issues here: use of a "dot" or a space to 
>indicate sections of a title, etc.  Yes, this discussion can get really 
>dull.  But when a film has an "English" title, there is also the issue of 
>upper and lower cases.  "BAD GUY BEACH" for example.  Should its 
>capitalisation be treated as purely stylistic.  Acronyms are kept in caps: 
>"MARKS no Yama", for example.  Do I preserve the low caps in "undo", the 
>formatting of "PiCNiC", etc?  The British Film Institute (BFI) ignores the 
>capitalisation ... they have to draw the line somewhere with more and more 
>stylistic devices being used in film titles.  Again, sorry this is so 
>pendantic.

I vote for maintaining the romanized words as is when they are in the 
original title.  The problem I have is figuring out whether the original 
title was in fact in roman letters or not.  With some films like 
Helpless, there's no ambiguity, but a lot of films, like Cure, have 
"Cure" in big letters on the press info, and then "kyua" in kana down 
towards the bottom.  Is "Cure" the official English title or the original 
title?  The best thing is to look at the film, but that's not always an 
option.

Stephen might respond that this can be solved by turning everything into 
the englishized version, but I argue this is precisely why you should 
not.  Say you do have one film released with the English letters "Cure" 
and another only in the kana "kyua."  To maintain the distinction, you 
have to provide the difference in the romanization.  This is in fact a 
real problem since there are several films with the title "Love Letter," 
some in the roman "Love Letter" and some in the kana "Rabu reta."  

Using colons seems to be the rule for books with subtitles, so I follow 
it with films.

>3. Romaji Title
>
>Long vowels are indicated with a European "hat" above the vowel.  I'm only 
>capitalising the first word, except in the case of proper knowns: 
>"Sazae-san", "Nihon", etc.  Again there are enormous issues of hyphenation, 
>and the best you can hope for is consistency.  Often films with two sections 
>(often released a week apart) are marked "Zenpen" and "Kohen" respectively.  
>(A simple example.)  I've opted to mark them simply as "I" and "II".  But 
>sometime, the "-hen" is a little more ambitious with, for example, 
>"ren'ai-hen" and "kekkon-hen" in "Ren'ai to kekkon no sho" to take an 
>example from Abe Yutaka's filmography on the sample page.  Or "onna no maki" 
>and "yuko no maki" in the case of Abe's "Onna to iu shiro".  Again, I'm 
>thinking of simplifying to a "I" and "II" ("III", etc) here, rather than 
>phonetic representation.  Is this a terrible idea?

Two things:

First, as I learned from working at libraries, even the Library of 
Congress does not have steadfast rules about romanization, hyphenization, 
and word division.  But they do have certain rules and I strongly 
recommend that you get a hold of them.  I don't have the citation on hand 
(Maureen, do you?), but it has been published.  The rules, by the way, do 
say: Sazae-san, and onnatachi.

Two, I agree with Markus that simplifying is not a good idea.

>There's also the difficult issue of how to resolve phonetic approximations 
>of English, usually given in katakana.  Given that the kanji (hiragana, 
>whatever) is also given, I opt to "correct" the approximation.  So 
>"Suwaroteiru" becomes "Swallowtail".  (In this email I'm ignoring long 
>vowels for legibility.)  But what about more difficult approximations: 
>"apaato" and "depaato" (as in "apartment" and "department store") become 
>"apt." and "dept." in this book.  (Aaron is smiling his UNcheesy grin now.)  
>And what about Agata Morio's 1994 "Otobai Shojo" which presumably refers to 
>"Auto-Bike" or "Motorbike".  (At this point Aaron is falling off his seat in 
>laughter...)  For a while I opted for "Auto-Bai" (!) but I'm now making the 
>exception with "Otobai".  (I know of lost any respect I've had on the list 
>at this point, when you realise that I don't have a life.)

Here's me and my cheesy grin.  I don't see the reason for rending these 
into regular English spellings.  Even if the reference book will have 
somewhat of a popular audience, the role of a reference book should be to 
give accurate information to a wide variety of users.  Giving the 
Japanese romanized title of a film should serve to give those who don't 
have access to the vernacular title an accurate representation of what 
the original title was.  The original title is not "apt." (I'm sorry, but 
that did not make me grin cheesily), but "apato."  The point then is to 
use established romanization rules (the major one being modified Hepburn) 
to render the title in roman letters.  If you do not, you are not giving 
people accurate information.  What is the point in rendering it "apt."?  
To give something familiar to non-Japanese speakers?  But then the 
purpose or definition behind giving a romanized title eludes me, since 
you are already changing it from the original pronunciation.  As I said 
above, distinctions need to be made: "Shall we dance?" is the English 
release title, "Shall we dansu" is the Japanese original title in 
romanized form.  Render them the same, and you've lost the distinction.  
(Of course, both should be given under their different categories.)

As Janine says, there are also practical matters like how to render 
Japanized English that doesn't exist in English: "pasokon" etc.  Or words 
that are originally in other languages, e.g. "baito."  Render pasokon as 
"Perso-Con" and no one understands you; do it as "Personal  Computer" 
you've lost your relation to the original title (it's more of a 
translated title).  Just keep to the romanized original and you solve a 
lot of problems.

>But what about directors who use 
>katakana in their names: is it Kotani Henrii (actually, "i" with a macron 
>here I think, and sometimes Henrii Kotani), Kurihara Tomasu and Gattsu 
>Ishimatsu?

These also should be rendered as they are originally pronounced in 
Japanese.  Adding a alternative or "translated" name is best for these 
people.  By the way, there is the problem of which name to use as the 
offical name: Kurihara, for instance, used the original "Kisaburo" as 
much as he did "Tomasu" in print.

>Another issue is when an actor's name appears in the title, "Enoken no...", 
>etc.  Is this actually part of the title or just "descriptive"?  I tend to 
>keep them.  And "pink" films seem to nearly always have two titles: one for 
>the video release, one for the limited theatrical release.  (Reflecting 
>different audiences, one presumes.)  Some of Zeze Takehisa's work, for 

Keep these names because they were part of the film and an important part 
of selling it (one sees it even in Japanese release titles of Hollywood 
films).

The pink film problem is big, but it's less the video-theater difference 
(pink films are mostly destined for adult theaters, not for video).  They 
have different titles when they were released at different theaters: 1) a 
regular adult film theater; and 2) an art house like Eurospace.  (These 
alternative titles are often used in common parlance among critics even 
when never actually used at a theater, because they were often the 
working title for the film in production.)  I tend towards the theater 
title: list the theater titles (two, if given different titles upon 
theater release), but ignore video titles unless it is absolutely 
necessary.

Much more to comment on, but I don't want to bore people.

Stephen, I do think you need a (long, if necessary) section at the 
beginning explaining the rules you used for all the various data.

Still, I do laud Stephen both for his efforts and for his willingness to 
take in suggestions (especially from cheesy people like me!).

Aaron Gerow