Japan, Quality - understand-culture

The Proofreading Department

The publisher Shinchōsha has a kōetsu-bu, a department for checking manuscripts. Its own site says that 60 people work there and check every publication. Their checks go beyond typos to the facts of what is described. One note to an author read: “From Tokyo to Nagoya, a car will not arrive in this time, even on the expressway.” Another noted that the hero’s home was on the first floor, while in the previous book it had been on the second.

The critic Tokuoka Takao called the department a lone demon of the publishing world, with an attitude that never allows a mistake. On October 5, 2016, Nippon Television began broadcasting the drama Jimi ni sugoi! Kōetsu gāru Kōno Etsuko (Plain but Amazing! Proofreading Girl Kōno Etsuko), with Ishihara Satomi in the title role. It was based on a novel by Miyagi Ayako.

Unsigned Articles

An article in Gendai Business calls the mushomei kiji, the article that the reporter does not sign, the mainstream of Japanese newspapers.

A column in a journalism review published by the Kanagawa Shimbun notes a change. Signed articles are increasing, even for so-called objective reports.

Three Colors of Correction

In 2022, the anime news site Anime! Anime! visited Telecom Animation Film during the production of the film Burū sāmaru (Blue Thermal). Each key animator drew a rough layout. The chief animation director, Tanino Miho, reviewed them. The corrections were added in three colors: green for the director, Tachibana Masaki, yellow for the animation directors, and pink for the chief animation director.

The key animators drew their key frames from these corrections. The animation directors and the directing staff then checked them again before they went to the in-between animators.

Checked By

An engineering drawing in Japan carries a hyōdai-ran, a title block. A drafting guide from the publisher Nikkan Kōgyō Shimbun lists what it can contain: the names of the designer, of the checker, the kenzu-sha, and of the approver, along with the draftsman and the date.

The guide adds that JIS, the Japanese Industrial Standards, does not prescribe the format of the title block. Each company sets its own.

Five Hundred Rejected Pages

Torishima Kazuhiko was a new editor at the manga magazine Jump when he worked with Toriyama Akira. In an interview with ITmedia, he described how the manga Dr. Slump came about. The two made manga and crushed them, made them and crushed them, again and again. It took about a year and a half.

Torishima recalled what Toriyama told him later. When Toriyama moved house, about 500 pages of drafts that Torishima had rejected came out of his closet.

Galley Proofs

The publisher Hitsuji Shobō gives its authors a guide to correcting proofs. The first proof is the shokō gera. The proof with its red corrections made is the saikō gera, and the next one the sankō gera. A proof sent at the end, just to make sure, is the nenkō gera.

Editors and proofreaders write their questions to the author in pencil on the proof. From the second proof on, the guide asks the author to check that the red corrections from the last round were made correctly.

Push or Knock

Suikō (推敲): pushing and knocking. The Daijisen dictionary defines it as examining the words of a poem or text closely and working them over again.

The word comes from a story recorded in the Chinese work Tōshi kiji. The poet Jia Dao was writing a line about a monk at a gate under the moon. He could not decide whether the monk should push the gate or knock on it. Han Yu, a high official and a famous poet, advised him.

The Order of Multiplication

In some Japanese elementary schools, a correct answer to a word problem can be marked wrong because the multiplication was written in the wrong order. In 2021, Tōyō Keizai Online described a case in Osaka in 1972. A child wrote 6 × 4 where the teacher expected 4 × 6. The answer was marked right and the expression wrong.

The national curriculum commentary says that the order of the two numbers should be respected when a problem about a number of equal groups is expressed as a formula. Asked by the magazine, the curriculum division of the Ministry of Education said that understanding what multiplication means is more important than the order. How to teach it, it added, also depends on each school.

Off-Hours Trading

On February 8, 2005, the internet company Livedoor announced that it had acquired about 35 percent of the radio broadcaster Nippon Broadcasting. It had bought the shares outside trading hours through ToSTNeT-1, not through a public tender offer.

The method became a public issue, and the rules were changed. On June 22, 2005, the Diet passed an amendment to the Securities and Exchange Law. From July 9, 2005, a purchase of this kind that takes the buyer above one third of the shares falls under the tender offer rules.