Japanese Words in Neuromancer | Hacker News Reader

Japanese Words in Neuromancer

jrogel.com

115 pointskeiferski83 comments

A lot of this feels pretty superficial. I was kind of hoping to see more of an analysis of how Gibson uses foreign words for texture, rather than a simple glossary.

The essay misses one interesting detail: along with the Chatsubo, another restaurant Case visits in the first chapter of Neuromancer is "a teashop called the Jarre de The". Both names mean "pot of tea" -- one in Japanese, the other in French. The juxtaposition is more than coincidence.

And this article is full of typos

And factual inaccuracies.

> Yakuza ヤクザ: is the largest criminal organisation in Japan, similar to the mafia.

The word describes a type of criminal organization, not a singular organization. There are many completely independant yakuza groups.

Yakuza organizations aren't likely to be "completely independent", even if rival and autonomous: their relationships tie them into a criminal meta-organization, which if pure enough can be seen from outside as "the Yakuza" even if it isn't a federation or a conglomerate.

It's just like "The" Mafia, even though we know there are multiple Families.

aren't there also multiple mafias? I thought a mafia was a type, and essentially the western yakuza

I've always found it mildly amusing that Gibson picked Chiba, of all places, for his "Night City". In reality it's a rather dull suburban, mostly residential extension of Tokyo (in Japanese, a "bed town") primarily known as the location of Narita Airport, with both criminal organizations and zaibatsu HQs in distinctly short supply.

That said, I'm not quite sure where I'd locate it. Akihabara would have been a shoo-in but that's been taken over by the anime crowd. Kawasaki, perhaps?

Did Chiba and Akihabara have their respective reputations in the early 1980s, though? It's a little silly to compare the modern state of a city with a 40-year-old projection.

Yes, nothing about Chiba has fundamentally changed since the 1980s.

Akihabara has shifted from electronics to anime/gaming, but that's a fairly natural progression and it's still very geeky/otaku, just in a different way.

https://sabukaru.online/articles/ghosts-of-1980s-japan-by-jo...

http://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/1983-akihabara-japan-cas...

昭和６１年の秋葉原（※別に高画質版あります） Akihabara 1986 (240p Low quality version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6zmIe0tJxE

Fun To See What Was For Sale In 1993 Tokyo Electronics District https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNoVD-ljVBM

Gibson made stuff up as any sf writer does. He never used a computer before writing Neuromancer, and he visited Japan for the first time in 1988, 4 years after first novel release.

Yeah, the first time I went to Tokyo I was excited to see that the train to/from the airport would be passing through Chiba. When we got there I thought: "Huh. Not what I was expecting."

There is a passage in the book with a potential explanation:

“There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of historical park, a reminder of humble origins.”

But I've never been able to find a corroborated connection between Chiba and the Yakuza, though the extent of my looking has been nothing more than some desultory google searches.

The yakuza are more active in southern Japan, particularly Kobe and Kyushu, than in Tokyo, although they can certainly still be found in the nightlife districts.

In general, they're also far less powerful than breathless Western reporting (including Gibson's portrayal) tends to make them out to be, in part thanks to a persistent multi-decade police crackdown.

if it is anything to go by (probably not), most Yakuza stories in mangas are about collapsed clans surviving or waning organizations trying to rebuild a mafia rule

They mostly run construction companies now, an industry where there's been a wild amount of corruption for a long time- in part why most rivers have completely unnecessary concrete banks, ostensibly for "flood control". See "Dogs and Demons" by Alex Kerr (http://alex-kerr.com/html/dogs___demons__english_.html).

Anecdotally, I know someone who owned a house in Okazaki (a city outside of Nagoya). Someone decided they wanted the land for a construction project, so they resorted to threats to get him to move- such as smashing his car windows. No way that was a random punk smashing windows- when I lived in Okazaki, a defaced public bathroom would make the local news. Classic Yakuza tactic, and unfortunately he ended up moving because of it.

That's fascinating, there was certainly no shortage of concrete in the places I visited in Japan. I got to wondering just how much concrete dust must be in the river sediment.

I always felt like Gibson was describing Sega City or Odaiba instead of 'enclaves near Chiba' .. Odaiba in particular 'feels' more like what he intended for the neighborhood, and its kind of in the same direction, relative to Ginza and central Tokyo ..

He wasnt describing anything, as he never saw those places until 1988.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/7/1/9/htm Transpacific Cyberpunk: Transgeneric Interactions between Prose, Cinema, and Manga

"Chronologically speaking, the moment Gibson shifts emphasis from cyberspace to junkyard was noticed when he paid the first visit to Japan in the winter of 1988. Celebrating the completion of the Cyberspace Trilogy, we had a welcome party for him at an ethnic restaurant called Sunda located just in front of NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) in Jinnan, Shibuya ward, Tokyo"

just like he didnt know anything about computers while writing about cyberspace

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson...

“I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics of the language of people who were already working in the field. I’d stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science fiction convention listening to these guys who were the first computer programmers I ever saw talk about their work. I had no idea what they were talking about, but that was the first time that I ever heard the word ‘interface’ used as a verb. And I swooned. Wow, that’s a verb. Seriously, poetically that was wonderful."

Gibson can be... flexible with history in interviews. Especially when it's a good PR blurb. E.g. the typewriter story that far outlived reality.

The truth when he says "I didn't know anything about computers" is probably more akin to "I didn't personally use computers. I did conduct deep and comprehensive research on their characteristics and use by others."

When he was blogging for All Tomorrow's Parties, the amount of esoterica and research he apparently read every day was staggering.

By typewriter story you mean the one from Cyberpunk: The Documentary (1990) (60p) https://youtu.be/UdvxPlhTjDU?t=2619 where he admits to not even touching a computer pre 1988 and using typewriter up to that point?

Yup. It circulated in a lot of pieces subsequently, up until he mentioned that he'd been using a word processor for the last several books.

Although I think a huge amount of the traction it got was a journalistic in-approval of "See, person who writes technofuturism hates technology."

The amount of research Gibson did for Neuromancer is really impressive and sometimes shines through in the text. For example, at one point he talks about an "annealing" algorithm. The term "simulated annealing" was first coined in a paper by Kirkpatrick et al. one year before Neuromancer was published. Was he talking to scholars who were reading cutting-edge scientific computing/optimization papers? Or was he familiar with metal annealing and just made the leap himself? Either way, it's impressive.

(I've also heard that the chemistry/pharmacology in Neuromancer also makes sense in a fairly detailed way, but I'm not qualified to assess this personally.)

He was probably reading scientific magazines. Cheap Truth, a zine from back in the days, had a review in #7 telling everyone how valuable they are for science fiction writers. Now sure that is not a fact about Gibson personally, but it's insight into the crew he hang with.

>> non-fiction magazines can help the SF writer and reader escape genre stereotypes and come to grips with the real social and technical issues of the human future. ~~ V.O.

That makes sense to me. Kilpatrick's simulated annealing paper was published in Science in 1983, so he could have run across the term while browsing through issues of Science. (Another theory is that he might have spotted various computer science talks at UBC when he was taking the creative writing course and decided to sit in on some as fodder for his fiction.)

I don't care if he saw them or not, I saw them and made the connection in my mind .. it just felt like he was describing Odaiba.

I think Kawasaki def works as a more proper "city between cities" vibe.

Prob not a weighty opinion, but I would probably look around Osaka, the idea of Nishinari mainly. But in general, the mercantile legacy of Osaka just feels more fitting to paint a "anything for a price" kind of dystopia.

And admittedly, I would say a big part of why I think that is that I think the real correct answer is just Ghost in the Shell's Niihama: Borrow heavily from Hong Kong, except it's in Osaka Bay or Tokushima (not sure exactly which, I always thought it was Osaka, but google has turned up both).

I always love to read HN comments from people that live in Japan (I have a special interest in Japan, for many small reasons).

I visited Japan a few times, and during the pandemic I spent 3 months in Kyoto. It was an absolutely incredible experience that I will never forget.

I even started to learn some basic Japanese - ten times, maybe? And of course gave up every time :(

One day I'll visit again, and I hope I'll meet tens of people like you, and listen to stories and details like the one in your comment.

Wan San Jose very interesting before it turned into Silicon Valley?

San José is still not very interesting now, in terms of urban experience- it can actually be described as “dull suburban“. And its size is mostly attributable to an imperiously expansionist city manager in the 50s and 60s, not only because of tech.

Apparently this went on to live a life of its own in Grand Theft Auto 2, where the district controlled by the Yakuza is named Funabashi.

I would wager that he chose it due to the name being simple and "unused". Kawasaki is a motorcycle brand so it would be slightly confusing, Akihabara is quite long and harder to pronounce.

"Ono-Sendai: in the book this is a Japanese corporation that manufactures cyberdecks. In Japanese “Ono” means ax and “Sendai” is the name of a prefecture in Japan."

Ono (斧) is indeed ax in Japanese, but is also a common surname. (The name is written differently, as 小野, no relation to axes.) Being a company name, it sounds more natural to interpret it as a surname rather than a weapon.

Also, Sendai is a city, not a prefecture.

For Gibson, a cyberdeck is mythologized as a guitar, and electric guitars are called axes.

Non negligible possibility: the "ax" is also the traditionally identified root for labyrinth - 'labrys' intending the "double-edged axe", and "labyrinth" the "extended, intricate palace under the symbol for power".

This may suggest (were it intentional from Gibson) the "matrix" as a futuristic labyrinth under the same symbol of power. (You - presumably - accessed the labyrinth through a portal with the labrys, and you access the matrix through a portal with the "ono".)

The one that struck me the most was:

"Sanpaku 三白 literally means “three” 三 “white” 白. It is used to describe eyes positioned in such a way that the iris does not touch the bottom eyelid, showing how the sclera is all connected." (if you google for 三白 images you will find many examples).

I thought it odd that a language needed a word for something like this (shades of the myth about Eskimos having hundreds of word for snow), so I asked my Calligraphy teacher about this (she is Japanese). Specifically, I just asked her: I mean, "the fact that someone is looking at you in a way that a slim portion of the white of their eyes is showing either below or over the iris" is something that is often a topic of discussion?

Her answer:

Not really, but in the past, people defined it as a criminal face and didn't really like it. Nowadays it seems like it's a part of beauty. They put Audrey Hepburn as an example.

(also, you would probably write 三白眼, - Just 三白 would be, "the snow falls on the first three days of the year" - or a horse with three white legs, like https://images.app.goo.gl/JBU1d9bQaAYmVVfj9 )

There was a book, You Are All Sanpaku by George Ohsawa (that most would have seen after 1983) implying Americans were in an unhealthy condition. Which we are, now more than then. But so are they, if maybe less so.

Having spent some time living the expat life in Japan its amazing how well Gibson captures the feeling of the whole experience, while making up the actual facts. Nothing I have read comes closer than Neuromancer in capturing the feeling of being thrust into an unknown environment and trying to survive on minimal resources.

The essay itself introduces a novel word: "drogadicts." I assume it's teledigitally translated from Spanish.

>It went from being considered as the source of cheap imitation gadgets during the 60s and 70s to the country at the forefront of high quality technology.

We see this repeated with China.

>Sarariman

I get using loan words when they have a different definition in the new language, but what's the difference between a sarariman and a salary man?

I guess the same as between an emoji and an emoticon.

Emoji doesn't share an etymology with the English word emoticon. 絵文字 just means "picture character" and is a native Japanese word.

Wow, I never knew! Thanks for explaining.

Those are different things. An emoticon is like :) where an emoji would be a single character of a smiling face.

Did the phrase "salary man" exist before the Japanese phrase? I believe it's kind of a loan word that just happens to be made up of originally English words.

Wikipedia seems to think it's not one of those:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman#History

On the other hand, Japanese Wikipedia[1] says it was originally a 和製英語 (wasei-eigo/Japanese-invented English word):

> ただしサラリーマン (salaryman) は元々和製英語であり、… 「サラリーマン」は和製英語であるが、後に欧米でも「"日本の"ホワイトカラーの会社員」を指す普通名詞（Salaryman）として浸透しつつある。

("But "salaryman" is originally a Japanese-invented English word [...] Though "salaryman" is a Japanese-invented English word, it has subsequently spread throughout the West as a way of referring to Japanese white collar workers.")

Though 大辞林 (one of the main dictionaries) does say "salaried man" in its definition, I'm not sure whether that proves that is the etymology (usually 和製英語 are noted differently but given that the term is used outside of Japan now they might just write it in a way that'd be understood even if it's not correct).

[1]: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B5%E3%83%A9%E3%83%AA%E3...

I’m not sure this is universally true, but in most contexts I’ve heard while studying Japanese and visiting Japan, サラリマン (sarariman) indicates someone with the kind of lifetime-employment, “I live in town in a coffin hotel during the week and only see my family on the weekends” job that used to be common for white-collar workers.

The identity, uniform, and work ethic are all part of the package. It’s been a while since most big companies in the US could claim that kind of life-long career and mutual loyalty was likely or even desirable, but early IBM might be an apt comparison., down to the dress code, company songbook, and 40-year tenures for senior staff.

The proper notation would be "サラリーマン", with a bar between リ and マ which indicates an elongated sound. In fact, writing it as "サラリマン" actually evokes images of a "caricatured western-POV stereotype of a Japanese stereotype salaryman" due to westerners frequently making this mistake.

This same sound shift is why the escalator says babI-car and not baby-car

Yep, you're right. My apologies. It has been about 25 years since I actively studied or spoke Japanese, and I was typing on my phone.

My explanation was trying for "understandable" but may have veered into "problematically over-simplified," not to mention insufficiently copy-edited.

Maybe salaryman hadn’t entered the English vocabulary by the 80s.

Salaryman almost always refers to Japanese white collar.

I think this is right. I read Neuromancer and first came to Japan in the 1980s. IIRC the term "salaryman" wasn't yet commonly known in English.

However, it was known by English-speaking people who had been to Japan, or were somehow involved with Japan. But not yet mainstream English.

It absolutely had entered English vocabulary, if only so far as to refer to Japanese people we were told were obliged to drink at karaoke bars with co-workers every evening.

Probably most Americans' awareness of Japanese words came from a very long James Clavell historical novel amazingly many people read, as was still done back then, called Shōgun.

I recall a very bad movie in which a black gang leader insisted on being called Shōgun, for no apparent reason.

I think you are referring to "The Last Dragon" which is considered an all time cult classic.

Shogun had been made into a TV miniseries with Richard Chamberlain c. 1980

Shogun, the TV miniseries, is pretty good. It features actual Japanese stars like Toshiro Mifune, and spoken Japanese (without subtitles) during much of the show, which was novel at the time.

I think the other commenter referred to an unrelated TV show with a gang leader calling himself "a Shogun".

"The Shogun", as it happened. And, a movie shot on actual film, as was then done, not TV.

> all time cult classic

Yes, it was really very bad. But in a good way, and had Vanity in it, 1985. Between it and Buckaroo Banzai (which had its own timely Japanese connections, 1984) I would choose the latter mentioned, but we don't need to choose.

not always: Tim and Eric https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maAFcEU6atk

There's a funny part at the start of another Gibson novel where the protagonist "wishes he was back in Chiyoda", which is kind of like saying you live in Santa Clara County instead of San Jose. I guess it was harder to do research back then.

I'm not sure I get this. Chiyoda no doubt refers to the ward Chiyoda in central Tokyo, immediately to the east of Shinjuku, so would be similar to someone who used to live in San Francisco saying "I wish I was back in the Tenderloin."

Chiyoda-ku is larger than the areas people talk about. eg you say Akihabara not Chiyoda-ku (or Taito-ku) and Ikebukuro not Toshima-ku.

Does anyone wish they were back in the Tenderloin?

> Does anyone wish they were back in the Tenderloin?

Generally not, but that's more because it's the Tenderloin than because it's so small.

The bahn mi places along Larkin were good, I miss Brenda's, and I'd gotten to the point where the lady at the nearest laundromat remembered my name.

People shit-talk the Tenderloin a lot but it wasn't that bad to live in for a single male with no kids, even at night.

Mensho is pretty good.

> "Cyberspace ... has actually become a common word used by all of us."

No, no it has not. Various corporate and government flacks, and tone-deaf reporters, have been trying for decades to make it a word we use. But we do not. I have never said it out loud.

And there is no reason to expect we ever will.

It stimulates leisure thoughts about what a "cyberspace" can be.

Directly, it is the sea: the kybernetes traditionally guides a ship.

The direct descendant, recognizable in sound, of kybernan is "govern", and the "space for governing" can be anything, any metaphor from the mind to the house to the world.

In the sense after Norbert Wiener, it is the space where feedback is key to orienting behavior - and, again, it could be everything (and, in satiric terms, nothing).

Cybernetics is, of course, the study of Kubernetes deployment.

The name of the software named "Kubernetes" makes sense only as a "governor" for containers.

Cybernetics /may/ be with effort used to indicate "management of agents", because your example seems to use it that way, but it seems unfitting: the image of the "steering man" for 'cybernetics', the "study of feedback based systems", comes from the fact of the heavy feedback that a ship and its controls give to the operator and must be managed to operate effectively - to "direct" a ship, you have to "govern" it (not simply "instruct" it), that is (seems to be) where the sense comes from.

"Cybernetics" clearly deals with all feedback based systems, not just "agents with respect to events and resources" (the latter by the way being more a matter of "economics") like the mentioned software seems to do (and one could wonder how much sophisticated theory is behind it, and how much just centralized management. Kubernetes, the software, does many different things).

(Of course, clearly yours remains a joke as a «study» involves "laws", principles, not implementations.)

It's become common enough that you know what it is without looking it up, which I think is a fine place for it to be, even if it's fallen out of use. World Wide Web, Information Superhighway, and other means of referring to what we just call the internet today are also somewhat esoteric, but you probably understand what they are.

It is a helpful marker for fundamental incomprehension of the topic being exposited, allowing us to skip to some other, possibly more enlightening material.

This reminds of a list I’ve been compiling for the past couple of years: English-language software and products with names taken from Japanese. I find them interesting because there has long been awareness, discussion, and controversy in Japan about the opposite phenomenon—English words used in Japanese.

The following examples all came from HN:

Koi Pond, a load testing tool. Koi (鯉) means “carp.”

https://slack.engineering/load-testing-with-koi-pond/

Anki, a flash card tool often mentioned in HN discussions. Anki (暗記) means “memorization.”

https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Bento, a framework for development of Linux kernel file systems. A bento (弁当) is a meal in a box.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.09723

Umami, a website analytics tool. Umami (旨味)’s original meaning is “taste, flavor, deliciousness”; it now also refers to a particular basic taste sensation.

https://umami.is/

Senpai, a gaming assistant. Senpai (先輩) means “someone senior to or older than one, typically in an educational or workplace hierarchy.”

https://senpai.gg/

Shodan, a search engine. Shodan (初段) means “first-level ranking in a skill, etc.”

https://www.shodan.io/

YubiKey, an authentication device. Yubi (指) means “finger.”

https://www.yubico.com/

Asahi Linux. Asahi (朝日, 旭) means “morning sun.”

https://asahilinux.org/about/

Neko, a virtual browser. Neko (猫) means “cat.”

https://github.com/m1k1o/neko

Kaitai Struct, a declarative language for binary data structures. Kaitai (解体) means “disassembly.”

https://kaitai.io/

Hikari, a custom logon script engine for Windows. Hikari (光) means “light.”

https://github.com/NoenDex/Hikari

Hikari, a Wayland compositor.

https://hikari.acmelabs.space/

Hikari, a thread manager and dispatcher.

https://artificialilliteracy.wordpress.com/2015/06/27/introd...

> Shodan, a search engine. Shodan (初段) means “first-level ranking in a skill, etc.”

In this context it's more likely a reference to the malevolent AI in the 1994 video game System Shock -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHODAN

> Asahi Linux. Asahi (朝日, 旭) means “morning sun.”

As noted on the Asahi web page, it is also the Japanese name for the apple cultivar known in the US as the McIntosh. :)

Tokei, a lines-of-code counter. Tokei (時計) means "clock", a play on the classic cloc (Count Lines Of Code) program.

https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei

Himitsu = secret https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/himitsu/

Of those, the only one I found surprising was yubikey.

My favorite type of loanword is ones that native speakers don't know is a loanword. Fun fact: the "honcho" from "head honcho" is from 班長, "hancho", squad leader.

I live in Japan, I convinced my Japanese bosses to buy a bunch of yubikeys, I make yubitsume all the time... and even then we didn't realize the connection

Uh, you amputate parts of your little finger [1] all the time? That sounds ... rather horrible and I really do hope there's some usage shift that I'm missing.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yubitsume

Maybe the Yubikeys didn’t work out so well?

I accidentally a word...

I wanted to say that I joke about yubitsume xD

Oh there are so many. Roku- because it was the founder's sixth company (means six) Gaikai (owned by Sony now)- 外海 "open sea" A lot of bioinformatics tools with sushi-themed names, stemming in part from the "sashimi plot" https://software.broadinstitute.org/software/igv/Sashimi and https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/Sushi.ht...

etc

One of my favorite parts of Cyberpunk 2077 the game, was the decent amount of Japanese used throughout. I think they really did nail the cyberpunk aesthetic, perhaps with some modernizations within. I appreciate as well that there was a full Japanese dub for a few of the characters including the main character.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com