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Something I’ve been meaning to put up for a while: Its the promotional campaign for Office for Mac 2008 Business Edition in Japan. The text reads
やるね〜 ビジネス ( It really does it ~ Business )
and
ファミリー ＆ アカデミック もあるね〜 ( There’s also the Family & Academic version )
やるね〜 ビジネス！
Another New Year’s card find — this time from 1996, Year of the Rat. As with the previous card, this one is done with Print Gocco
Text:
Fiction by Vermin Vesse / Interview with Ratbert
The Ratlantic Mousely
January 1996
The New Underground Economy
The Economouse
Rodents In Congress
Taxes – Paying the Piper
Minnie Breweries
Happy Year of the Rat
Dude! You’re getting a really stinky Dell!
For the non Japanese readers out there, this is a link to a web page at Dell Japan, where the word for “Microsoft” is misspelled just enough to be really really embarrassing for everybody involved.
From the Book せかいののりもの (“Sekai no Norimono” — Things to ride on of the World), published in Japan 1999, copyright Disney Enterprises Inc. If you look carefully, you can see the characters names in katakana.
So the question is, how intentional is the R — was it a joke — was it deliberate — was it a simple mistake?
The fact that the quality control of Disney products are in general so high makes it unlikely that this is planned: Other aspects of the drawing are done to Disney detail: the colors of the shirts are the traditional ones for the triplets. And such details would not be changed for the Japanese market — Disney sticks with the American versions of character names when written in romaji — see for example Huey Dewey and Louie’s Good Time Cafe at Tokyo Disneyland.
It’s also hard to believe it is a joke. An L / R confusion is a pretty juvenile joke for a talented illustrator, and there isn’t any other running joke or gag that it could be a part of. Not to mention that L / R confusion is a less than flattering stereotype for Japanese. In the picture, the triplets are standing in a road apparently in France ( that’s the double line behind them ), so it is conceivable that there is wordplay on the French ‘rue’, but this seems far-fetched.
So the likeliest explanation is that it was originally a mistake. I doubt we’ll ever know.
As if Japanese baseball wasn’t having enough problems, now the umpires are threatening to call strikes.
Hideki Matsui homenrs in his forst preseason game for the Yankees, and already the clueless American media is screwing up. JOSH DUBOW, “AP Sports Writer” scrawls
I don’t think so. His face earned him the nickname. His power earned him 20 million over three years plus incentives.
Big Box of Paints 