Quote:
Originally Posted by whulsey
How do you find all this off the beaten track stuff? Is it a safe assumption that you speak and read at least some Japanese?
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Greetings
My ability to read Japanese starts and stops with being able to recognize the characters for "paper craft", "download" and finding "radio button"s linked to a PDF.
I do a lot of semi random clicking and sometimes get lucky and find a paper model. Many companies and organizations sponsor paper models as a come on to visit their web pages, so they are not extremely rare. Cruising the Japanese internet is interesting, strange and weird, definitely NSFW and takes a lot of bandwidth since Japanese web sites are loaded with animation and images.
Japanese Amazon has huge lists of paper models for sale that make the offerings of the Eastern European dealers look puny. Unfortunately, most Japanese dealers will not ship outside of Japan. They must be getting enough Japanese customers that they do not need to seek out international customers.
Babelfish and Google translate are only semi helpful. A lot of Japanese web page writing are images, not computer recognized characters, and most machine translated Japanese does not make much sense anyway. You know you have entered a different universe when you are asked to taste the happy joyful of paper crafts or feel the warm pulsing of the completed model. They use a lot of idioms and figures of speech which do not cross over. I have had English speaking Japanese tell me that Japanese machine translated from English is pretty crude and disgusting, so the computer translation problem works both ways.
Japan seems to be a good place for the paper model otaku.
I am glad you enjoy my finds.
06-20-2013, 08:52 PM
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