Articles

How the Heck Do You Write about Japan?

by Alice Gordenker

Journalist Alice Gordenker spoke to SWET on September 16, 2010 in Tokyo, providing a behind-the-scenes account of how she crafts her popular “So, What the Heck Is That?” column for the Japan Times. In this monthly column, in its seventh year as of this writing, Gordenker has achieved a balance of humor and respect in meticulously researched yet... more

Rebecca Otowa on Writing at Home in Japan

by Avery Udagawa

What is it like to be a foreign-born wife, daughter-in-law, and mother in a 350-year-old Japanese farmhouse? To undergo years of traditional training before becoming the chatelaine?

And what is it like to write and illustrate a book about this experience? To have a review and one’s wedding photo published in the New York Times?

Rebecca Otowa titled... more

The Hadashi no Gen Project

by Alan Gleason

Alan Gleason’s experience as a translator began in 1977 with the manga Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen), as part of a volunteer project that continued for 30 years. Project Gen inadvertently became the world’s first publisher of manga in translation when it issued Barefoot Gen Volume One in 1978. With the tenth and final English volume... more

About Mori Ōgai on Translation

by Kay Vreeland

The American Lauren Elkin writes a literary blog in Paris and she posted on Mori Ōgai on translation and fallacy. A snippet: “Ōgai talks about the virtues of being ‘wrong’ in translation—adding or detracting from the original text; of most interest, I think, is the final section in which he contemplates how far... more

SWET Open Forum 2009: Wordsmithing in Japan

by Katherine Heins

Where to go for translators’ resources, how to control your computer’s Japanese inputting settings, what an editor needs to know about word processing and other software, how to market your professional skills and carve your niche, how to get your work published, what to tell a Japanese author who wants his/her work published—these were some of the questions... more

Some Notes on Anthologies

by Suzanne Kamata

According to conventional wisdom, anthologies are a hard sell. Readers supposedly don’t buy them; reviewers are generally loath to review them; therefore, publishers tend to shy away from bringing them into print. Nevertheless, pick up any writing magazine and you’ll probably find a call for submissions to a forthcoming anthology. For example, in the January/February 2009 issue of... more