From: davidg@aegis.or.jp (Dave McLane)
Newsgroups: fj.news.group,fj.misc,soc.culture.japan
Subject: Re: MAKING NOISE part 1 (english)
Date: 21 Aug 92 23:23:45 GMT
Followup-To: fj.news.group
Organization: Aegis Society, Kyoto Japan

abennett@athena.mit.edu (Andrew A. Bennett) writes:

>I don't know if you knew this, but as of a week ago, MIT began to receive the
>"fj"newsgroups.

Very interesting. All ~167 of them? 

>I just wanted to say that any postings in english are very much appreciated,
>since:
>
>a) most Americans (including me) cannot read/write Japanese

Me too <sigh>. But there must be somebody at MIT who can read
Japanese, as why else would they por them (?) 

>and, more importantly
>
>b) apparenty the characters you use don't come out right on American
>computers.  We just get lots of symbols, like:  #$%^&* (I have *no* idea
>how those symbols just translatd over to your systems).

They get translated into Japanese characters. What else, Greek? <smile>

The come out strangely on many/most computers used in the U.S. don't
support the Kanji (the name for the Japanese character set, like
Cyrillic is the name for the character set for Russian).

But as long as the host lets all the Kanji characters through (some
hosts remove the escape characters which are used to shift from the
ASCII alpahabet to kanji and back again), they can be displayed
correctly on American computers.

For example, Aegis, the host I'm posting this on, is running on a
ISC UNIX on a Dell 386 33 MHz mailordered from Austin Texas. The news
software (rn & nn) has had the kanji patches applied so all the
characters needed to display kanji are sent to the terminals. 

For somebody to actually see kanji, their terminal support the kanji
fonts. And there are programs that run on AT class machines and Macs
that provide the fonts. When I need to see the kanji, I fire up DOS
V5.0/V which lets any AT program that read/writes the console via
BIOS calls (Telix v3.12, WordPerfect, etc.) display/enter kanji. 

Actually it's a bit more complicated as there are at least three
types of kanji codes in use (JIS, SHIFT-JIS, EUC) but that's the idea. 

>Finally, thank you very much for putting what language the posting is in the
>subject line.  It helps a lot.

Yes, it sure does! However, sometimes a thread starts out in
'[Japanese+English]' but the English disappears as people only reply
in Japanese. So don't be dismayed if you go to read something that
says 'English' in the Subject: line but is all in Japanese; it's
just like threads in other newsgroups where what is being discussed
has drifted away from the original topic. 

P.S. As you will see if you continue to read this newsgroup
(fj.news.group), there is discussion (some people say "endless
discussion" ;-) about the formation of a new newsgroup called
fj.life.in-japan. The charter is pretty open:

  Communication channel for foreigners living in Japan, between
  themselves and with those who are willing to contribute.

As far as I know anybody who can post to the group can take part, so
maybe you would like to take part. I think the main idea is to have
some place where foreigners like myself can discuss the practical
aspects of living here, rather than the political aspects which are
discussed in soc.culture.japan. 

Cheers,

Dave

--
Dave McLane  davidg@aegis.or.jp
You're free to copy/quote/translate as long as credit is given. 
Nagaokakyoshi, Kyoto Japan Tel: +81-75-951-1168 Fax: +81-75-957-1087
Newsgroups: fj.news.group