TRANSLATOR'S TOOLKIT

The process of translating Ningen Isu is something of a massive group effort. The band hails from the Aomori (lit. Blue-Forest) prefecture of Japan, northwest of Tokyo. The predominant dialect of Japanese in Aomori is known as Tsugaru-Ben, one of the most distinct dialects of Japanese– and one of the hardest for even native speakers to parse. This is made particularly evident by the constant shortening of vowels and a distinct regional vocabulary.

To demonstrate this distinction, I’ll offer the following translations in Standard Japanese, Tsugaru-Ben, and English.

ENG: I eat rice in the morning.
SJPN: Asa, watashi wa gohan o tabemasu.
TB: Asa, wa-a mama ba gushi.

[Note: The subject (I) is first, the Object (Rice) is second, and the Verb (To Eat) is third. The non-marked particles (Wa, O, -A, and Ba) are signifiers that tell the listener/reader where these words fall in SOV order. Gushi is indicative of the softening of hard /K/ and /T/ sounds, moving towards /G/ and /D/. Gushi is traditionally written as Kushi, I have changed the spelling to note the aural difference that would not be conveyed through text alone.]

These differences are made manifest due to the influence of the Ainu language intermingling with Yamato Japanese, leading to a hybridized dialect. In some instances, the pronunciation is likened to French– so much so that a native Tsugaru-Ben speaker was cast to play a French woman in this Toyota Commercial. My ability to engage with Tsugaru-Ben is in part to my traditional schooling in the function of Japanese, yes. But it is only through the works of online archivists and language enthusiasts who have made great efforts to preserve online webpages regarding the language: from archiving Tsugaru-Ben dictionaries online that have otherwise been removed from their original hosted website, to creating a number of blogs and public-research webpages so that people (like myself) can readily access information about Tsugaru-Ben at a moment’s notice, even from the comfort of their apartment in Kentucky.

I will also note that Ningen Isu will occasionally implement terms from archaic variations of Japanese in their lyrics, as a means to produce their aesthetic as a band led by a scholar-poet, a monk, and a yakuza drummer. The personas that each band member takes on ultimately underscore the oddity of the band not only on the western front, but in their home country as well. Note well that persona performance is not unique to this band, or JMetal in general. This is a permutation of a trope understood in metal bands across the world. (Consider, Ghost, Goblinomiikon, Lordi, Sleep Token, GWAR, to name a few)

This project was not only made viable by the work of online archivists dedicated to the language, but to the work of online fan communities surrounding Ningen Isu. While the band has been producing work since around 1987, a good number of their earlier albums are not readily available on streaming services. This includes their 1998 album Degenerate Art Exhibition, which is home to the song Dunwich Horror that I’ve used in this project. In order to listen to the song at all, I was at the mercy of a netizen known as Electric Tatami, who had posted the song on Youtube. As of writing this, the video has been up for a decade now, with just under 150,000 total video interactions. In the world of social media and virality, Electric Tatami’s video is something of a blank disk at the back of a yard-sale. If Electric Tatami had not endeavored to share this MP3 with the world, this project would not exist as it does. Granted, I could have drawn attention to any other Ningen Isu song, but the conversation about adaptation and translation would be massively different.

I must also draw attention to the lyric documents collated by a redditor from one of the Ningen Isu fan-forums online. These files provided the lyrics to the song in Romaji (Romanization) and in a kind of rough-English translation that served to clarify the Tsugaru-Ben. But, as useful as these initial translations are as a reference, I created this project to play with an adaptation/translation of the song which allows the lyrics to fit the thematic flow of Dunwich Horror, but also clearly delineates the relationship that Ningen Isu shares with bands like Black Sabbath and King Crimson.

From a translator’s perspective, this is the tricky part. Standard Japanese and English already have a distinctly different meter in performance due to the cadence of both languages. Tsugaru-Ben complicates this even further with the shortening of vowels and softening of certain sounds. From a metrical perspective, Ningen Isu’s long, protracted doom-and-gloom style in Dunwich Horror should be something of an oxymoron. But the style of the music and Shinji Wajima’s growling drawl make an excellent playground for translation. I should also note the semi-obvious: there are much more opportunities for rhyme in Japanese than there are in English. Drawing from the traditions of the bands that Ningen Isu lists as their own inspiration is not only historically relevant, but also a means of understanding how the genre itself utilizes rhyme in English.

I should also mention that this sort of online, fan-based archival and preservation of media from Metal bands is not a random phenomenon. Metal, as a subculture relies on community lorekeeping and community dissemination of information. Ningen Isu’s works have only breached western streaming services within the last ten years, meaning that western audiences are only able to participate in the community because of the power of the global internet.