Tag: Internet Archive

Dazai’s School Notebooks

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Dazai Osamu attended Hirosaki High School from 1927 until 1930, and many of his school notebooks from this period, complete with the inky doodles of a bored schoolboy, are currently being held in various University and Museum archives. Three of them have made their way online and have been preserved by Yobanashi Café over on the Internet Archive. The scribbles inside the notebooks include many portraits, including self-portraits and what appears to be Akutagawa Ryunosuke. These notebooks are valuable not only as an insight into the young Dazai, but also help us understand the type of education that was provided at High Schools during the early Showa era. 

In the chemistry notebook, there is a detailed sketch of a schoolboy walking with a geisha, possibly a self-portrait of himself with his future wife, Oyama Hatsuyo, who he met in 1927.

Links to each scanned notebook:
Dazai’s High School English Notebook
Dazai’s High School Ethics Notebook
Dazai’s High School Chemistry Notebook

For a transliteration and short commentary for each notebook please see:
English Notebook transliteration
Ethics Notebook transliteration
Chemistry Notebook commentary by Hiroshi Ando

Japanese in Three Weeks by S. Sheba

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A digitisation of the 1935, revised 30th edition of Japanese in Three Weeks, available to download via the Internet Archive.

A fantastic resource for translators who work with older material, it contains a wealth of contemporary phrases and how they were translated between English and Japanese. Illustrations throughout, including sentence diagramming and red text for emphasis. Gained some attention when I tweeted about it back in July.

It makes a strong case for gathering our courage and going for those more interpretive translations, for example ‘I begin to see the light’ being translated into the archaic but simple ‘sukoshi wakari dashi-ta’ (sic), or ‘I am tired to death’ becoming the much less fatal ‘sukkari yowatta’ (see page 117 below).

The book is very small and the copy I have is not in very good condition, so I apologise in advance that some pages are a bit warped and wonky with age and deteriorating binding, there wasn’t really much I could do about that short of skinning the book, and I really didn’t want to flay the poor thing – so wonky it is!