Question about Japanese titles... (E+J)
Aaron Gerow
gerowaaron
Mon Jul 31 21:01:33 EDT 2006
Jason,
> When titles are listed as????????or ??????
> ??? for example, with the hiragana in parentheses, I
> assume that indicates the furigana, but is it officially
> part of the title in eirin and prodco records etc.? Never
> quite been sure about that.
I have usually treated these as simply guides for reading the character
and thus as not officially part of the title. The final arbiter is, of
course, the title screen in the film itself (are these, for instance,
really put in their "proper" place as yomigana or eliminated
altogether?). How Eirin or other institutions treat them in part
depends on how they construct their databases. Webcat, for instance,
puts ??(???) in the title line for Kawase's book, but only lists ??? in
the reading of the title (e.g., not Hotaru hotaru). It also lists only
?? for the manga gensaku, without the yomigana.
As I remind people, when in doubt, check how your local library does
it. Especially in the USA, there are strict rules for rendering titles
and doing romanization, and since what you use may be used by your
reader to look up something in a library, it is polite to try to keep
to the library rules. (There are lazy catalogers out there, so try to
check the web catalogs of big East Asian libraries like Columbia (the
superb Morimoto-san!), Harvard, Yale, etc.).
> Also, in the case of ?????????, I take it the
> hiragana is there at all because the title is not a real
> word and people might not know the yomikata, but in the
> case of
> ????????, is it because they didn't include a ?
> ?after ?, which also might confuse readers? I guess it
> was dropped for aesthetic reasons. Thanks.
It seems to me that one of the trends in Japanese horror or mysteries
(including manga) is to use lots of kanji (that connects with all those
occult priests, official records, etc.), so I imagine there was a
conscious choice just to use the kanji. But since?? can also be read as
kyo (sometimes kyu), they might have felt the necessity to add
yomigana. But we'd have to ask the people involved to make sure.
Aaron Gerow
KineJapan owner
Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
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