From: mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch (Martin J. Duerst)
Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
Organization: University of Zurich, Department of Computer Science
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 93 21:09:51 GMT


In article <ISHIKAWA.93Jan25211508@ds5200.personal-media.co.jp>, ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp (Chiaki Ishikawa) writes:
> In article <1js0l3INN3f1@life.ai.mit.edu> glenn@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu (Glenn A. Adams) writes:
> 
>    In article <ISHIKAWA.93Jan22211810@ds5200.personal-media.co.jp> ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp writes:
> 
>    [Regarding 3 vs. 4 stroke grass radical...]
> 
>    >I don't care how many strokes there are. BUT, for once, I STRONGLY
>    >DISAGREE.  If you ask ordinary Japanese of modern Japan in the street,
>    >they would say that the characters using the radical mentioned in the
>    >upper position above and the characters using the radical mentioned in
>    >the lower position above are CERTAINLY DIFFERENT. I would bet about
>    >1/3 to half the people would even say, "you are writing an INCORRECT
>    >characters."!
> 
>    That they are judged different is not the issue; the issue is whether
>    a person can read the text (i.e., is it legibile).  Even Japanese who
>    would judge it incorrect could still read it, 
> 
> Frankly, I have a doubt if youngsters these days would recognize as
> valid characters. 
Well, if you look at what kind of character variants are used in manga,
which surely a lot of youngsters read every day, I think that such a
variation should not be too much that even youngsters get the idea that
that might be the same character.

> 
>    and, yes, they *may*
>    notice it, surely they would in a typeset document, but would they notice
>    it in a 14-point screen font?
> 
> Anyone using 14 point font for Japanese display ought to be shot! :-)
> [The reason Japanese operating system environment of Apple Macintosh
> was frowned upon was its initial use of 12-pixel font!]  Grownup users
> of cheap terminal fully understands that some characters don't come out
> right. We call them Uso-ji. (Uso is lie. Ji is character.) Educators
> won't allow such terminals in elementary schools (I sincerely hope
> so.)
Hope you don't shoot me. I use 14point fonts a lot. On X-Windows, 16bit
doesn't look good, and 24bit is many times too big to get enough information
on the screen.
Again, teachers might disalow such fonts in schools, but arcade games
are using them without problems where necessary, and youngsters understand them.

(text deleted)
> I would like to comment, however, that the Japanese educational system
> especially the elementary ones put much emphasis on aesthetical
> consideration about writing letters. As John B. Melby pointed out
> (Message-ID: <MELBY.93Jan22160502@dove.yk.fujitsu.co.jp>)
> 
> 	>(Food for thought:  have you heard of a US student
> 	>being criticized by a teacher for having the wrong number of bars
> 	>in a dollar sign?)  
> 
> 	In Japan, if a student put, say, a bar in slightly misplaced
> position in a character or put the bar slightly touching other part of
> the character when it should (NOTE the usage of SHOULD!) not, a student
> can fail a test and required to practice until he/she gets the RIGHT
> (CORRECT) writing. If a student make a mistake about the NUMBER of
> bars as in Melby's rethoric question, no question asked, he/she will
> definitely fail. This was the case in my childhood and, although it
> seems that latitude for variation seems to exist today, there is no
> fundamental difference in the current education system.
> 
Yea, that surely is true for the time you are learning to write characters
(1-6 grade or more in Japan, about 1-2 grade in the West), and in calligraphy
courses. But nobody fails a highschool entrance examination or an university
entrance examination for this. You have to write too fast in these tests
to have time to care about aesthetics.

> Probably, people here due to the educational emphasis may put more
> value on the aesthetical outlook for daily usage of characters in
> Japan.
> 
> Although, my handwriting is very lousy nowadays, I DID study the
> calligraphy just like ordinary Japanese do, and if I see an incorrect 
> character, I cringe on it. [One of these days, cheap DTP systems abound
> and incompletely trained editors abound, and the result is a lot of
> magazines have so many typos here. This is NOT good, but I digress here.]. 
> 
> [Frankly speaking, I wonder what the Japanese delegation to CJK were
> doing. Don't readers of this newsgroup wonder, too?  Taking a nap
> during the discussion? :-) Of course, I doubt it. But, I can't
> understand where their priority was during the CJK meeting. Wonder why
> they didn't voice these concerns... My guess is that they really
> didn't bother to think about the mixing of different country's
> character sets. Print company's delegate, for example, would never
> think of using a "standard UNICODE" font at his company, of course.
> They would use special high-quality in-house Japanese font for printing
> and use additional printer mark-up language to handle all other
> country's font.]
It may be of interest to you that real printing companies in the west have
never used plain ascii, and probably will never use plain unicode.
They did (and will do) as in Japan: Use their proprietary (or otherwise
heavily paid) fonts wherever they can, and as appropriate as possible.

As for the Japanese delegation, I wasn't there. I can only say the following:
First, JIS-212 is part of Unicode, and many printing companies, newspaper
companies, associations of regional and local officies, and so on, have
been considered for its construction. Second, the main criterion of
whether to unify two similar characters (if this wasn't forbidden for
criteria like round-trip, different meaning,...) is truely the one used
by JIS for JIS-208 and JIS-212. The grass radical is just one of the
examples where the difference was considered too small to justify different
coding points (JIS-212, p. 80). 

(text deleted)
> 
> At my thirty something age going strong for 40, I do know that there
> were old Chinese characters and can recognize old pre-WW-II Japanese
> characters more or less.  But, youngsters[10s,20s] in today's Japan
> may NOT. And THIS IS A GRAVE CONCERN. 
> 
And where they really don't (as the old character for body (karada),
which is completely different from the new one), this character gets
a different code. But to help youngsters to recognize old characters,
or other Chinese/Taiwanese/Korean characters, it might be better to
tell them: "well, there are some minor differences, and we in Japan
write like this, but basically they are the same, so that is why they
have been unified" than to have to say: "Well, may be that was the same
some time ago, but now they are so different that you will never recognize
similarities again, and therefore they there have to be different coding
points for the different languages."

(text deleted)
> 
> Another thing is that if someone writes a text mixing the correct
> (accepted) characters and characters using different (old, maybe)
> radicals, he/she is considered nuts at worst or eccentric at least.
> We have no use for such writing system in ordinary life unless we are
> writing a fan letter to, say, Saturday Night Live :-)
> 
No, JIS is just exactly doing this. Take Radical 162 (shinnyou) as an
example. In Jouyou/Touyou-Kanji (or is it level 1), al characters with
this radical have just one dot. In Level 2 and in JIS 212, they have
two dots. There are many other examples.


>    If you can show me a text where the difference between a 3 and 4 stroke
>    grass radical makes a difference in meaning, then I may agree with you.
>    [I would exclude from this test a text which is artifically making a
>    distinction, e.g., to create a pun based on the written form of the
>    character.]
> 
> No, from my knowledge of characters, probably I won't be able to
> produce a text. [The only place where such difference DOES make great
> difference is proper nouns, i.e., people's names and names of places.
> These are important exceptions, and should not be ignored. A publisher
> can get sued if you consistently print somebody's name using incorrect
> characters, I suppose. Yeah, they don't make meaningful distinction TO
> ME and probably to you(?). But to someone whose name is often
> misrepresented by incorrect characters, it MUST be a big deal. 
> However, I don't think this is a good examples of the general topic we
> discuss here. Still, Glenn-san, you may be someday faced with such
> unhappy person, unhappy because of the UNICODE WITHOUT rich-text
> standard.]
I would appreciate an example for such a law case. As I understand,
litigation is not that common in Japan, and practical reasons (the
limitation of your wordprocessor, e.g.) are easily accepted as an excuse.
Of course, repeatetly and conciously, and without practical reason,
to use a different character may be something different.
But to go as far as a Japanese aquaintance of mine, who insisted
that his family name in Latin letters had to be written all CAPS,
is clearly an exception.

(text deleted)
> 
> 
>  Chiaki Ishikawa,  Personal Media Corp.,  MY Bldg, 1-7-7 Hiratsuka,
>  Shinagawa, Tokyo 142, JAPAN. FAX:+81-3-5702-0359, Phone:+81-3-5702-0351
>  UUNET: ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp


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Dr.sc.  Martin J. Du"rst			    ' , . p y f g c R l / =
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