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) |