AAA Games
Ubisoft | Beyond Good and Evil 2 | 2018 | Featured Prominently in Soundtrack
Platinum Games | NieR Automata DLC | 2017 | Coliseum MC English VO
This is my “mama,” Sachiko Shida, a woman with a spine stronger than tempered steel. She modeled kimono at the Paris Collection in the 1970’s, and she fought tooth and nail as an “outsider” from podunk Miyagi to be recognized as a formidable presence in the cutthroat nightlife of Kyoto's Gion. Want to know more? So did I.
02
She became my mentor in that most tradition steeped quarter of the most tradition steeped city in Japan; showing real and deep love for me by being as strict as she would be with a real daughter. I was constantly schooled in my attitude, body language, and polite phrasing. I came to be known as “nidaime” (the inheritor of her business) and enjoy a certain notoriety in the quarter to this day because of it.
For all of her prim elegance though, she also has a wicked sense of humor. When people ask how we met, she says “didn’t you know I had an indiscretion with a foreigner when I was young?” She delightedly cackles each time the gullible fall for it.
A decade before I met mama, my acquisition of Japanese was via the hard knock school of necessity. Sure I had a scholarship for an exchange program at Seika University, but I went three months early to take an unpaid internship at The Kyoto Journal. With no money and no contacts, I bicycled all over the city and lived off radishes and instant noodles. For company I sought the lonely grannies whose eagerness for a listener overcame any reluctance about this strange white alien. Their stories not only taught me Japanese, but a perspective of the world I had never previously encountered.
(I was also lucky enough to be scouted by an NHK agent when down to my last radish…but that’s a story for a different time)
My Japanese is not the average studious collegiate kind. I never learned the grammar by reading a textbook; instead, like a child, I made mistake after mistake, devouring whole phrases and idioms with a fierce hunger to communicate. I’ve cursed with mafiosos, and internalized the exact degree one should bow after receiving exquisite service in restaurants that are by introduction only. I crack bad dad jokes in Osaka dialect, and I sing traditional songs in old Kyoto phrasing. This is where I shine for you, through the breadth of my vagabond experiences.
I could never translate a scientific textbook adequately, but the translators who can never quite manage the knack I have developed for localization. A knack that is especially necessary in the field of entertainment, where creative nuances constantly shift meaning from the literal. There is no such thing as “perfect” interpretation…but I’ve always loved an impossible challenge.