Futago no Teikoku v3 (complete)

Let's move right onto volume 3! Hopefully, Breading Bad and I can finish this volume before August. Also, don't attach that much importance to how I romanize a lot of the character names. Most of the characters are clearly not meant to have Japanese names, and the limited number of vowels/consonants in Japanese is making it difficult to know what English spelling I should give from the Japanese spelling. Even Fa is technically written as "Fua" in Japanese, but I decided to spell it as Fa to make it consistent to the vol. 1 translations and to make it easier on the eyes of English-speakers.

*Update: Yay, volume 3 is finally done! Sorry this took so long and much thanks to Furakutarou and Zephyrus from mangadex for helping me out. Volume 4 tankoban ran into delays in Japan and still isn't out yet, but we're gonna go ahead and do some of the chapters that we have magazine scans for in the near future.

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Futago no Teikoku v03:   Mega

Futago no Teikoku c13:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku c14:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku c15:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku c16:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku c17:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku c18:   Mega

Discourses on Salt and Iron - Part 1, Chapter 34: De-prioritizing Punishments

These are pictures of a Ming-era percussive deep well drill used to extract brine. On the right, you can see bamboo tubes that feed natural gases to the stoves where the brine is evaporated for salt. What's particularly surprising that the two essential aspects of the brining operation, percussive drilling rigs and gas stoves, as seen above were all developed by the time of the Han dynasty (206BC-220AD), and later centuries simply improved on the process to construct better rigs that could dig deeper and deeper. For a better idea of how this all worked, you can take a look at this page and watch the video below:

 

I bring this up to point to the sophistication of the salt industry in Han China, which monopolized it along with the iron industry to fund its vigorous foreign policy, primarily against the Xiongnu steppe nomads to the North. Although a topic of great interest for historians of science and industry today, the salt and iron monopolies was a pivotal issue in imperial China that for thousands of years, shaped the ideas of emperors, scholars, and officials on what the ideal role of a state should be, what the ideal type of governance should be, and what the ideal relationship between a state and its economy should be. This was possible because the famous debate between those who advocated the monopolies and those who decried it were immortalized by the government official Huan Kuan in Discourses on Salt and Iron (Yan Tie Lun 鹽鐵論). A somewhat rough analogy for the American would be the influence that the Federalist papers have had on American thought on the nature of their republic. It is a rough analogy, of course, because whereas the Discourses on Salt and Iron gives equal weight to both sides to show how the dialectic between Legalist and Confucian thought played out in shaping government policy, the anti-Federalist papers had been, I think, much less read and influential.

The Distant Dawn

Illuminati-Manga and I bring you something that we planned a long time ago but only finally got around to: A Distant Dawn by Hoshino Yukinobu. If you've been following me for a while, you'll know that I've done a few other stuff by Hoshino before (Stardust Memories, Sea of Fallen Beasts, Legend of Giants) and clearly have a soft spot for him. The same applies for Illuminati-Manga, who's done some more Hoshino manga. But this collection of short stories is particularly special because it contains his debut oneshot (The Steel Queen) as well as the oneshot The Distant Dawn, which won the Tezuka Award all the way back in 1975 and helped launch his mangaka career. In fact, half of this nearly 500 page-long collection is dedicated to his earliest works in the late 70s! So if you like Hoshino Yukinobu at all, I'd highly urge you to read this to get a better understanding of his development.

2019 Status Update

Happy 2019, folks. Just a quick status update since I've been dead for so long. The truth is that the first half of 2019 is gonna be pretty slow on releases. I just have a lot on my real world plate right now and I'm really trying to give it much higher priority over the manga-stuff. It's not that I've lost interest but I have much less left-over energy to attend to scanlation at the moment. But it should get back much more normal from about July or so.

The only positive news I can give right now is about Futago no Teikoku. My previous scanner/cleaner/typesetter went missing on me for half a year, and hence the hiatus. No hard feelings on him, it happens to everyone, just like how I'm basically being inactive right now. That being said, some mangadex volunteers wanted to help out, so that we can pump out some chapters. I've already had the rest of v3 translated, so it shouldn't take long before we get the remainders fully released, which would actually more or less catch us up with Japan since tankoban for v4 is still not out.

That's all I really have to say. Sorry again for being inactive but you know, that's life. Here's a famous Li Bai poem for how I'm more or less feeling (click link for translation).

床前看月光

疑是地上霜

舉頭望山月

低頭思故郷

*PS. It honestly seems like heresy to me that a later Qing-dynasty editor would change 看 (see) to 明 (bright), and a Ming-dynasty editor would change 山 (mountain) to 明. That being said, I think the 看 to 明 is actually pretty good because it then neatly makes the first two lines of the poem intransitive verbal descriptions about the poet's surroundings while the last two lines are transitive verbal statements on what the poet Li Bai does. Maybe it's just me?

Ad Astra v08 (complete)

Time to start up the new volume. Shenanigans in Syracuse this volume.

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Ad Astra v08:   Mega

Ad Astra c46:   Mega
Ad Astra c47:   Mega
Ad Astra c48:   Mega
Ad Astra c49:   Mega
Ad Astra c50:   Mega
Ad Astra c51:   Mega

Historie 107

Iwaaki says he's gonna take a break to work on touching up  the art for the upcoming tankoban v11 for Historie so it's gonna be another long wait.

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Historie c107:   Mega

Ad Astra v07 (complete)

Battle of Nola will be the main highlight this volume.

Yay, the volume is finished before the end of the year! We have 6 more volumes left so I'll try my best to get the series done before the end of 2019.

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Ad Astra v07:   Mega

Ad Astra v07 c39:   Mega
Ad Astra v07 c40:   Mega
Ad Astra v07 c41:   Mega
Ad Astra v07 c42:   Mega
Ad Astra v07 c43:   Mega
Ad Astra v07 c44:   Mega
Ad Astra v07 c45:   Mega

Kamui-Den volume 1 (last updated Oct. 5)

At last, Happyscans and I will be starting Kamui-Den (Legend/Life of Kamui), the legendary manga that was the poster child for Garo magazine and its associated gekiga movement (I'll do a proper introduction/commentary much later). If it were up to Happyscans, we'd have started this like two years ago, but I was busy and kept putting it off (gmail tells me we first talked about doing it all the way back in 2012!). Plus, I didn't really want to embark on another long manga series so soon after finishing 60 volumes of Sangokushi. But I think now's a good time, and this will be my "main project" for some time. Although the original was published as 21 volumes, the version we're working from is the 15-volume definitive edition (kettei-ban) of part 1 that was published in 2005 to commemorate Shirato Sanpei's 50th year as an artist. Each volume in this edition is about 400 pages, so I'm planning on doing 4 volumes/year (a volume for each season of the year!). When factoring inevitable delays, it'll maybe take 4-5 years to finish. That's just for part 1, of course, and there's another 12-volumes for part 2. So this'll take a good decade to finish completely.

In any case, Kamui-Den starts off a little slow, but I hope you'll eventually pick it up and stick with it as Happyscans and I continually work on it. And while Habanero Scans who gave me the HQ kettei-ban scans advised me to just do volume releases, I'm gonna release in smaller chunks at a time, if only to better motivate me. It's probably better to read it as each new volume comes out.

*Some other notes regarding my other projects. Scripts for v2 of Futago no Teikoku are complete, so that should be done soon. Breading Bad is almost done with cleaning v3 as well, so we should be able to jump right into that with little delay (*crosses fingers*). Planet of Sutakola had been delayed due to difficulties in finding a cleaner, but I think I'll just tackle it even with my own limited skills once I finish Kamui-Den vol. 1 so it doesn't just lie forgotten and collect internet-dust forever. If you have any other questions about my projects, feel free to ask here.

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Kamui-Den v1 c01-03:   Mega
Kamui-Den v1 c04-07:   Mega
Kamui-Den v1c08-09:    Mega

Historie 106

Ughh... Maybe I should just translate Historie every two chapters as well.

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Historie c106:   Mega

Some Thoughts on the Roman Republic's Weakneses

It's been close to a year since I last wrote on a topic from European history, so with my 5-part post on Classical Chinese done, I think now's a good time. And since I just began translating Ad Astra, I'll go mainstream and talk about Rome for once. But rather than talk about how strong Rome was thanks to its military, I'm going to talk about how weak the Roman Republic was as a state and how this contributed to its fall. Just a heads-up, this post is really just a book summary in disguise which — I know, I know — is a lazy thing to do. But I do think the book brings a perspective many supposed Romaboos who only ever read Osprey military books don't quite seem to be aware of.