The first one "A Six Feet Girl" isn't that interesting, it seems to be six pages built around an odd bit of visual word play, yet this might signify something.
It's about an unusually tall girl, and not much else (you can't tell much story in six pages), but what strikes me is this particular translator's note regarding the girl's name
Translator's note: Noboko's family name literally means "new tall mountain", and was also the former Japanese name of Yu Mountain in Taiwan, at the time the highest mountain in the Japanese Empire. "Noboru" in Japanese can also mean "to climb". Together, they form a pun on "Niitakayama nobore", the codeword used to launch the attack on Pearl Harbour.
That'd be like calling a character "Dee Day" in English, and considering that the mountain she was named for is in Taiwan and not Japan, you might want to think about the implications that the naming of this character represents a small desire for a new Japanese Empire, or at the very least a small bit of nostalgia for the old one.
Couple that with this post at Captain's Quarters about more calls within Japan to define "defense" to include preemptive strikes against North Korea (Japan's military is still constitutionally limited to being for "defense" purposes only).
Also something to consider, Japan could have hundreds of nuclear ICBMs within a matter of months if not weeks, at any time they choose to build them. They have the missle industry, they have the launch facilities, they have tons of weapons grade plutonium stored within their borders (anywhere between 5-20 tons depending who and how it is counted), they have dozens of nuclear power plants that can produce tons more, and they definitely have the technical know how and the computer technology required to virtually test designs without actually detonating a device, so they could begin stockpiling these weapons in secret, and like Israel, are basically considered a de facto nuclear armed country, even though officially they don't have nuclear capabilities.
If attacked, the Japanese response will be old school, thorough and genocidal, hopefully Kim Jong Il won't be as crazy as he seems, and Japan will never be tempted to 'defend' themselves by wiping out North Korea (unfortunately, given the nature of North Korea, anything less than wiping out their entire infrastructure and a good portion of their population on the first strike would leave Japan vulnerable to a nuclear counterattack)
Kim Jong Il seems to be betting the lives of all of North Korea on the notion that nobody is willing to kill as many North Koreans as he has been willing to kill. That's a bet he'll lose in the long run, he needs to fold, or be taken out of the game.
2 comments:
That'd be like calling a character "Dee Day" in English....
Been done. Well, sorta....
I've seen worse, though, in the form of jokes about the attack on Pearl Harbor in Bo-BoBo, of all things. Wild, weird stuff, as The Man used to say....
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