Talk:Hiroh Kikai

message: One problem with many art books is that small paintings and large ones are reproduced to more or less the same size: the degree of reduction is left to vary and it's not easy to distinguish between what was originally small and what was originally large.
If the Mediawiki software is left to do the job, there'll be no distinction between Ōtachi (Ecce Homo) at the one extreme and In-Between on the other. I therefore specified the sizes.
The heights of the covers are, to the nearest half-centimetre:
*Persona (1st ed): 33cm
*In-Between 8: 17.5cm
*Ōtachi: 35cm
*Ya-chimata: 21cm
*Indo ya Gassan: 20cm
*Perusona (2nd ed): 21cm
*India: 30.5cm
*Labyrinth: 23.5cm
*Shanti: 28cm
The tallest is of course Ōtachi; the shortest In-Between. If Ōtachi is 240px high (which is big, but I think not too big), In-Between is 120px (which is small, but I think not too small). At this scale:
*Persona (1st ed): 226px
*In-Between: 120px
*Ōtachi: 240px
*Ya-chimata: 144px
*Indo ya Gassan: 137px
*Perusona (2nd ed): 144px
*India: 209px
*Labyrinth: 161px
*Shanti: 192px
(In-Between 8 and India are wider than they are high.) 
Thence the image sizes. -- Hoary 10:50, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Creative idea, linking the relative image sizes to their relative real sizes. I like it! Phidauex 16:19, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Image sizes

message: I've assembled the Japanese (transcribed, rōmaji) titles, Japanese (Japanese script) titles, English/Latin original (alternative) titles, and English (freshly translated) titles with some care. (Of course this doesn't mean I haven't made mistakes.) I've also put quite some care into their markup, attempting for example to distinguish between original and freshly translated English titles. (Again, this doesn't mean I haven't made mistakes.) I couldn't find very useful guidance for this in MoS (possibly because I didn't look hard enough), and had to devise a few distinctions and solutions by myself.
This isn't "my" article and of course others can edit. However, before rushing to fix an apparent inconsistency, do please examine the system so far. Briefly:
*Japanese-language titles of magazine articles, etc, aren't italicized, despite being in Japanese; they're merely in quotation marks. (I thought that italicizing them would obscure the distinction between them and book titles.)
*The English (or Latin) alternative title of book is added after a slash. If it's a book title, of course it's italicized.
*An explanatory English translation of a title (one that's not on the original but instead is added for this article) is added in parentheses.
Of course it's possible that there are mistakes here, and people might disagree with the whole system. -- Hoary 10:15, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Article and book titles, and bibliographic info

message: A lot of notes point to "Shōmeidō Gallery", i.e. this page. The content of this page is very similar; if the former disappears, the latter can be substituted. -- Hoary 10:11, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Shōmeidō Gallery link

message: "Hiroh" is the way in which Kikai fairly consistently spells his name when writing it in rōmaji/rômazi (though I have seen "Hiroo" in the occasional magazine article); it's for this reason that this article is titled with "Hiroh". And it's "Hiroh Kikai" rather than "Kikai Hiroh" (a form that Kikai also uses) merely to accord with a Wikipedia guideline with which I heartily disagree. (I await the analogous renaming of Mao Zedong as "Tse-tung Mao", and the analogous renaming in ja-Wikipedia of Tina Modotti as "Modotti Tina".) -- Hoary 00:17, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Name and article title

message: There's so little about Kikai in English that I thought it might be acceptable to add a couple of blog entries that were informed, fairly interesting, and even informative. Not as sources, of course, but in the "external links" section. So I was about to hit "submit" with:
*Review of “Tokyo Labyrinth” at the Yancey Richardson Gallery. DLK Collection, 22 September 2008.
*Review of Asakusa Portraits. DLK Collection, 4 February 2009.
but then I got cold feet and didn't. Still, here they are; and if the obviously knowledgable "dlkcollection" were to reveal who he or she was, it might even go in. -- Hoary (talk) 14:35, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Blogospherical appearances

message: In this edit (which I accidentally reverted; I'd intended to undo it with a polite comment), an editor changed "Hiroo" to "Hirō".
Both "Hiroo" and "Hirō" would be trimoraic. However, the former is also trisyllabic (at least in principle), whereas the latter is bisyllabic. 
I believe that a careful speaker of his name would pronounce it like the placename Hiroo (and the miscellaneous other Hiroos), and thus that "Hiroo" is preferable as a romanized form. -- Hoary (talk) 04:45, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Pronunciation of his name

message: Substituted at 17:57, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment

message: Hullaballoo Wolfowitz, you removed several images: edit summary, "multiple nonfree book covers in author bio". Where's the beef? ("Minimal usage requirement"?) -- Hoary (talk) 00:30, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Per the annotation to WP:NFCI#1, while such covers may be used in articles where the primary topic is the book itself, the basis for their inclusion "does not usually apply when the work is described in other articles, such as articles about the author". The Big Bad Wolfowitz (aka Hullaballoo).  Treated like dirt by many administrators since 2006.   (talk) 00:36, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Removal of images

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 6 external links on Hiroh Kikai. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 20 external links on Hiroh Kikai. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060210071152/http://shomeido.jp/gallery/contents/exhibitions/exh2005/200501kikai/200501kikai.html to http://shomeido.jp/gallery/contents/exhibitions/exh2005/200501kikai/200501kikai.html
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thread_title:  External links modified (January 2018) 

message: , you write . A somewhat tired and sleepy glance at the exhibitions section suggests that it's pretty well referenced, though I wouldn't be surprised if dead links or questionable sources lurk therein. Please point out where the problems are. 
By contrast, I'm very surprised to read that the publications section could also do with some more. Simply, the section doesn't have any separate "references", because (in my view at least) it doesn't need any. I'll take a list item as an example:
:*Tōkyō mutan () / Labyrinthos. Tokyo: Sōshisha, 2007. . Collection of 118 monochrome photographs and essays; captions (for each, the approximate address and the year) and essays are in Japanese only.
The book is titled both  (read as Tōkyō mutan), and, less conspicuously, the roman-script Labyrinthos. What might conceivably need to be referenced? "Approximate", perhaps? Right now I don't have a copy at hand and therefore can't check for sure, but my (dodgy) memory tells me that a typical photograph might show anything from part of the facade of one building to most of the facades of a dozen buildings. If it has one building, then the actual address of that building might be 東京都大田区東大井3ー1ー8 (a fictional example for explanatory purpose), and if a dozen then their actual addresses might range from 東京都大田区東大井3ー1ー5 to 東京都大田区東大井3ー1ー17 (ditto); by "approximate", what's meant is that the caption for either would have an address "rounded" to 東京都大田区東大井3丁目 (ditto). Well, I think that's what he does. If my memory is right, then a very legalistic editor may say that "approximate" is imprecise (how is it approximated?) or even an undesirable value judgement. Well, one could get around both objections by saying instead "(for each, the address [specified to the chōme] and the year)" but this strikes me as pretty pedantic. Everything else that's said about the book can be verified by an inspection of the book itself. Similarly, virtually everything that's said about each of the others can be verified by an inspection of that book. (Or do I perhaps misunderstand your objection?) -- Hoary (talk) 12:50, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I was mostly hoping for some more english language sources, though I am surprised at the shear number of links i missed when skimming through (maybe I just saw all of the notes and assumed that the sections were unsourced), so consider that a mistake on my part. I would still like a few more english language sources though, but other than that I guess this gets the ok from me. Gex4pls (talk) 13:12, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: , in the "English-speaking nations", few people seem to be interested in Japanese photography. Most of those who are have a small number of names in their heads: Araki, Hatakeyama, Kawauchi, Morimura, Moriyama, Sugimoto, and that's about it. Japanese photographers such as Kikai, Kimura, Nagano, Shiotani, Suda, and Yasui are very little known. Unfortunately I can't read Chinese, but I can work out that, for example, a news item in Chinese on Kikai's death is just that. In order to reduce the dependence on Japanese, I might add some more Chinese-language sources. A 2015 exhibition in Paris was accompanied by a slim book and a website, each in both French and Japanese; but unfortunately (if unsurprisingly) the website doesn't seem to have been updated. (Also, both book and website are introductory.) Perhaps I should hunt for more sources in French; after all, unlike Chinese, it's a language that can be read by a lot of the people who read English-language Wikipedia. -- Hoary (talk) 13:42, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  I see that there very well may be no English sources, but they would certainly help the page, especially with the fact that it has been added to the home page. However, it isn't that big of a deal for now. Gex4pls (talk) 13:51, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Sourcing for exhibitions and publications

message: , somewhere in this series of edits, you changed
:Ya-Chimata, published a year later, has a greater number of portraits printed more cheaply on smaller pages.
(with no explicit reference) to
:Ya-Chimata, translating to 'A Gallery of Kings' was published a year later in 1996.
(with two explicit references). This raises a number of minor points, but I want to bring up just one. 
It seems to me that you're having the article imply that ya-chimata means "a gallery of kings", and doing this because you believe this source says so.
The title of the book is . It lacks any roman-letter title. It's here at Ci.Nii (which is far more reliable than WorldCat). This gives the reading of the title as . I'm guessing that you're unfamiliar with katakana, but this online utility to the rescue. It transliterates the katakana as "ya chimata : ōtachi no kairō".
Now let's look at the reference you cite. It says:
:1996 Ya-Chimata: Dtachi no Liro ("Yachimata: A Gallery of Kings). Tokyo: MisuzuShobo,1996
So "Ōtachi no kairō" has become "Dtachi no Liro". Grotesque! But at least that web page doesn't suggest that ya-chimata means "a gallery of kings". On the contrary, it shows that "a gallery of kings" is a translation of the subtitle. (Incidentally, an accurate one.)
So what does  mean? It's in hiragana, suggesting that it's not thought of as a loanword; yet it's hyphenated with a nakaguro. This is an unusual combination -- one that goes unexplained here. Kikai is pointing out that it's not "yachi-mata" but "ya-chimata" and thereby hinting at the meaning. This yachimata is more formally written , and it means a place where a road divides into eight (or some comparable number), or a place where the paths going off are confusingly numerous (source). A problem is that the kanji 衢 is obscure and little known. Where it must be written, it's often simplified as ; however,  is how the name of Yachimata (a "city" in Chiba) is written, and thus might give the wrong impression of the content of this book. Thus the hiragana. -- Hoary (talk) 23:35, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: , Appreciate the note. Please can you go ahead and fix as appropriate. The earlier statement had no references at all, and had to go. Good luck, and thanks! Ktin (talk) 23:56, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you, . Fixed, I hope. Arguably, an explanation of the word ya-chimata ought to appear on the the first appearance of the title. Feel free to move it there if you wish. (My own way of thinking is that a list of publications is where pernickety stuff -- ISBNs and so forth -- is expected, so detailed notes are better attached to a list item than to a sentence of the main text.) -- Hoary (talk) 00:53, 22 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: ''Ya-chimata'' and its meaning