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.
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.
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.
Dame-dashi (駄目出し): putting out the no-good. Pointing out faults and weak points. The word comes from the theater, where dame o dasu means giving an actor notes on what is wrong in the performance.
Mada mada da ne (まだまだだね): not there yet. The catchphrase of Echizen Ryōma, the hero of the tennis manga Tennis no Ōjisama (The Prince of Tennis).
Chūgen mimi ni sakarau (忠言耳に逆らう): loyal advice offends the ear. The Daijisen dictionary traces the saying to Chinese sources such as the Records of the Grand Historian and explains that advice tends to hurt the listener’s feelings and is seldom accepted with an open mind.
Sanryū wa mushi, niryū wa shōsan, ichiryū wa hinan. A third-rate player is ignored, a second-rate player is praised, and a first-rate player is criticized. The sports magazine Number quotes the line to describe how Nomura Katsuya, the baseball catcher and manager, treated his players.
Children who take Shinken Zemi, the correspondence course of the education company Benesse, send their work to an akapen sensei, a red-pen teacher. The teacher corrects the work by hand and sends it back with comments.
In 2020, Benesse said that about 10,000 such teachers were following children’s learning from their homes across Japan.
In the TV program Purebato!! (Prebat!!), celebrities write haiku. The haiku teacher Natsui Itsuki rates each poem as sainō ari (talented), bonjin (ordinary) or sainō nashi (untalented). She also corrects each poem, cutting and changing words without mercy.
At Sukiyabashi Jirō, the Tokyo sushi restaurant of Ono Jirō, an apprentice trains for about ten years before being allowed to make the tamagoyaki, the sweet rolled omelet.
The apprentice Nakazawa Daisuke, who appears in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, has said in interviews that he made it about 200 times before Jirō accepted one. In the film, he says he cried when Jirō finally said it was good.
In May 1965, NEC launched what it named the ZD undō, the Zero Defects movement. Its president, Kobayashi Kōji, had seen the ZD mark during a visit to Hughes Aircraft in the summer of 1964. ZD stood for a slogan about doing work without defects.
Kobayashi wanted more than a movement against defects. He also wanted to awaken a sense of participation in the company among ordinary frontline employees.