WITLife #5 – Keeping up on the Japanese news
Career, Japan Trends, Translating/Interpreting, Uncategorized, WIT Life, Writers 
Comments Off on WITLife #5 – Keeping up on the Japanese news
WITLife is a periodic series written by professional Interpreter/Translator/Writer Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken, 2000-03).
Starting with this post I thought I’d introduce a more behind the scenes aspect of WIT life, that being the preparation and work that takes place when I am not traveling or working on an assignment.
In order to keep my Japanese skills sharp, besides conversing with native speakers (don’t be afraid to ask to be corrected!) I enjoy the daily programming of Fujisankei. In particular, the news airing at 7 a.m. (rebroadcast at 10) every weekday morning is especially insightful for keeping up to date on what’s going on in Japan and beyond, and how certain concepts would be expressed in Japanese.
An essential part of being a translator/interpreter is knowing the correct vocabulary for recent phenomenon, as these are words that change with the times and require constant updating of your brain. For example, in Japan the collapse of our economic institutions is referred to as リーマンショック or “Lehman shock.” When the buzzword of the Republican presidential campaign became “maverick”, I wondered whether this term would be translated into katakana or if there was a particular Japanese expression. As it turns out, the phrase一匹狼 （ippiki ookami）or “lone wolf” is often used to describe someone with this attitude.
A spot that caught my interest on the news this morning was about a group of unlikely boarders in group housing facilities, the elderly. This growing phenomenon is tied to the Japanese public pension crisis, said to be a demographic time bomb of increasing amounts of retirees and a decreasing birth rate. With reduced pensions, the elderly are living on limited incomes and finding themselves unable to afford to live alone or enter a nursing home. They therefore have to turn to places where they are forced to share bathrooms and other amenities with others. Incidentally, most of those profiled didn’t have families to help support them.
The rent for these facilities ranged from 40,000 to 110,000 yen and generally included breakfast and dinner. Some interviewees seemed sad about their situations, eating alone in their rooms and having to depend on the facility for everything from food to funeral arrangements. Others seem to make lemons out of lemonade. They profiled a woman in her 80s who lived in a facility along with college students, the only place these two varying demographics could afford. With a smile she said the thing that keeps her going is being among the youths, and they showed her daily ritual of saying “Ittekimasu” to the students at the genkan as they left for the day.
I guess it’s not just the elderly here in the States who are finding that the golden retirement they had hoped for might not be possible…
Comments are closed.