Little Manuela is a unique and lovely corner for jazz lovers.
I love its jive and juke, I hang out there with chums from my high school
days, I have made new and dear friends including the Owner and the Webmaster,
and I have been having fun translating the articles in this web site.
The Webmaster of this site is a college professor by day, a Jazz lover
and singer by night. Because of who he is, the original Japanese articles
of this site is full of sophisticated humor, which is a challenge for
me to translate into English without losing the import and fun of the
original Japanese. Also, since Little Manuela is in Japan, may of the
seasonal events are based on festivities and traditional customs observed
in our country that may not be familiar to our non-Japanese readers.
In this section, I will write the backgrounds and explanations of the
traditions that are observed as events at Little Manuela.
I will also write about the humor of some of the expressions that have
come up where the innuendos can only be understood in Japanese, so the
translations are not verbatim, but figurative in order to convey the
humor. Some of these come from our traditions, others from the character
of our written language. As most of you know, written Japanese is a
mixture of "kana", the Japanese alphabet, and "kanji"
the Chinese characters. Although there is only one pronunciation for
the "kana", most "kanji" has at least two, in some
cases, several pronunciations. Also, in many cases, there can be more
than ten "kanji" for one pronunciation. Hence there can be
a lot of word play with double, or even triple, meanings, using the
various pronunciations of the kanji, and this word play is unique to
our language, and difficult to catch and understand for the non-speakers
of Japanese.
If you have any questions or you find anything interesting that you
want to know about somewhere in this site, please feel free to put it
up in the guest book, or send an email to the Webmaster to forward to
me.
|
I am sorry, I cannot answer them through
personal emails, but I will add anything informative that might
help you somewhere into this site, most likely into this section.
I hope the information that I put up here will help the readers
to understand the atmosphere of Little Manuela, and Japan in general
and enable you to enjoy this spot even more.
2003/06/01 SKT |
Ms. SKT (right
side) |
