音の帯〜Phonon Belt

Today, Mr. Hirasawa brought up the idea of making his Twitter account private, so that only people he allows to will be able to read it. It sounds like he's investigating whether he can make his account private or whether he'd have to make a new account altogether, and what a "locked" account entails.

In response to the general cry of despair and questions about what prompted this desire for privacy, he wrote: ( about how having 50,000 followers makes him uncomfortable, and how he hates people taking his words out of context. )

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I am not sure what he's referring to. Was there some particular incident that brought all this up? Is he simply tired of people making fun of him or taking him out of context on NicoNico or Youtube or Twitter or 2ch or Pixiv or blogs? He's a public persona and does get talked about a lot.

These statements also made me wonder whether I should keep translating Mr. Hirasawa's tweets here. ( Read more... )

If he does make his account private, I will not publicly translate his tweets anymore.

I think I will try to translate more of his older tweets, but take more care to make sure that the risk of something being taken out of context is minimized. Perhaps friends-locking those translations would be one step I could take.

If you have any thoughts on the matter, I would really appreciate your input.

Hello, all!

Sorry for the lack of translations recently, but life is very demanding right now. Still, I am closely monitoring our dear Mr. Hirasawa's latest actions on Twitter and will probably post a more detailed update on it as things play out a bit more and I find the time to translate it coherently.

But I'm so excited, so I thought I'd jot down some notes about these developments: ( Read more... )

It'll be interesting to see how this fictional story develops, but it's sounding like he has a whole new character in mind, a superhero Stealthman who fights evil nuclear power, or something like that. What's most fascinating to me is that it seems that Mr. Hirasawa FOUND this storyline within his own actions. I don't think he started measuring radiation or making yogurt at night as part of grand scheme to make a random protest song go viral. I think he did those things and--being the genius he is--discovered the potential story and is now elaborating on it every day, teasing us with more details that paint an ever broader picture. It's also rather interactive, since he seems to be doing it all via Twitter right now (and even though he denies it, it is VERY clear that he does read the responses he gets on Twitter, at least sometimes).

It feels like we're watching a master storyteller improvise a new tale with a few random elements and before we know it, we might witness how that random tale takes the form of a legend. ;)

Perhaps I'm overly excited, but I can't wait to see how this plays out!

I have just hit the "ship" button on an order of things including Mr. Hirasawa's SP-2 book.

I AM SO EXCITED.

I have no idea what the essay to photo ratio in this thing is, since it appears to be mostly a photo book, but I assume there will be some delightful material to translate anyway.

In other administrative news, updates and comment responses from me might slow down over the coming weeks as I will be moving from one continent to another, ending one significant phase of life to start preparing madly for the next, etc. etc. You know how it is.

♥

A conversation with another Hirasawa fan the other day made me wonder if I should include the romanization of the lyrics I post here so that people who can't read kanji/kana can sing along or appreciate the sounds of the Japanese lyrics better. It's not that much more work for me, but I just hadn't thought of doing it. ^^;

Another thing I've been pondering is translating a few interesting excerpts from Mr. Hirasawa's blog and such. I wouldn't want to post entire blog posts for various reasons, though.

Finally, it seems that there are other fans wondering about Mr. Hirasawa's long-standing interest and advocacy on behalf of transexual/transgender people, particularly those in Thailand. I know I looked for English info about this a while ago but didn't find all that much. But he himself talks about these issues quite a bit in his blog, his videos, etc. He's discussed things like the economic hardships of transexual people in Thailand, violent attacks friends of his have faced, his own personal sexuality and gender expression, the hilarious hijinks he's had in Thailand, etc. I'm personally very interested in gender studies and the like, so to me that's all very fascinating, but I'm wondering if people would actually care to read what I've gleaned from Mr. Hirasawa's public statements about these matters. ^^

So, if you happen to read this, I would be grateful if you would respond to the following questions:

1. Would you like to see the romanizations (pronunciation guides) for lyrics on this blog?

2. Would you like to see some blog excerpt translations?

3. Would you like to read about Mr. Hirasawa's views of transgender people in Thailand?

4. Do you have any other suggestions for this little translation blog? :)


~~Thanks!