Hacker News Reader

Comment by microtherion | Hacker News Reader

Evidently nothing came of the proposal, but I find it very difficult to believe that the executives of a Japanese company would "laugh" a proposal like this "out of the room". I imagine the scene played out with a lot of tea, carefully calibrated bows, and apologies about the timing of this excellent proposal not being auspicious.

patio11 probably could provide a more accurate projection of a sarariman reaction to the MS offer.

View on HN

They may have met with Nintendo of America? Which would make this story plausible

Nintendo of America is headquartered in the same city as Microsoft (Redmond WA), so this is definitely plausible.

I was going to say Nintendo is across/down the road from Microsoft, but checking again, Microsoft surrounds them:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Nintendo+of+USA/@47.651052...

With Go rules, they'd already be ours!

alternative map: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=428818970#map=16/...

Historical perspective: At that time, Microsoft did not surround them, as far as I recall. Nintendo was a separate and distinct office complex.

Equally polite, even to a crazy person https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-and-reggie-fils-aime-h...

Kanye visited the Nintendo Booth during that E3 and was even able to spend a bit of time with Shigeru Miyamoto. He then requested a meeting with Reggie, and the two ended up meeting up at one of Kanye's offices in Calabasas, California.

I told him, ‘Kanye, you don’t want to work with us because we’re tough, we’re hard. All we do is push for the very best content. We would not be the type of partner you would want to work with.’

"Why can't I work with you?"

"Well, Kayne, it's because we only want the best. We push very hard for that."

"And…"

"You're not that."

You have such a naive stereotype about Japanese people

That and it's apparently making fun of Japanese accent ("sarariman"). It's a pity that this is the top comment on HN right now.

It's clearly a direct transcription, rather than a translation, of サラリーマン. I doubt any mockery is intended.

Thanks for clarifying that. I might have been wrong about their intention then, but mockery seemed plausible given they were also painting a very stereotypical picture of a business meeting.

Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt!

As for stereotyping… maybe! But isn't "laughing a proposal out of a room" a stereotype as well?

> but mockery seemed plausible

How about we stop assuming mockery just because it might seem plausible and instead we lean toward "no offense intended" by default?

Sarariman (adapted from the English salary man) is the Japanese term for white collar worker.

Native English speakers tend to just say "salaryman" when speaking to other English speakers. Adopting a faux Japanese accent, particularly in print, is extremely cringeworthy.

Sarariman is a Japanese word, the original commenter wasn't adopting a false Japanese accent. Here's an article from the economist using the term: https://www.economist.com/special-report/1999/11/25/who-want...

I lived in Japan for years. I have never seen English speakers write "Sarariman" instead of "Salaryman" when talking about the phenomenon.

Yes, my intent was not to mock a Japanese accent, but to adopt what seemed to me the most plausible spelling. In this particular case, the Japanese concept has far eclipsed the original English word, and the term was more or less a Japanese creation in the first place[0], so that's why I spelled it that way.

In other cases, the English spelling is still dominant, so using a back-transliterated katakana spelling (e.g. "Rabu Hoteru" instead of "Love Hotel") would be just weird.

[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=salary+man%2Cs...

> Native English speakers tend to just say "salaryman" when speaking to other English speakers.

We don't tend to use salaryman at all. There's white-collar, businessman etc. By contrast sarariman had been popularly coined in the 90s by the Japanese.

I believe the parent meant we would say 'salaryman' when speaking of the Japanese conception of the term. Which in my experience is true. It could be because 'sarariman', though a reasonable approximation of the Japanese pronunciation, does sound like a racist caricature, but I think it is equally likely it just feels awkward to the native-english-speaking tongue.

> does sound like a racist caricature

But it isn't. How about we stop assuming offense by default and instead we try to expect that other people are as reasonable as we are? For that matter, that one is in the guidelines here.

The English word "cookie" is derived from Dutch "koekie".

If some Dutch people bring back Oreos as souvenirs from the US and call them "cookies" instead of "koekjes", are they adopting a cringeworthy faux-American accent? Making fun of how English butchers their language? Or just calling them the way Americans do, without any further judgement?

Possibly, yes.

Also see the term "barbecue". A good portion of words in any language have just been appropriated and mangled along the way.

Apparently you don't know about katakana, its a form of the Japanese alphabet that is specifically used for foreign words translated to Japanese. The pronunciation of these words sounds similar to their foreign counterparts. think sararimam == salaryman, hanba-gu == hamburger, terebijon == television and so on.

katakana - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana

If he really knows kana, he should write it as sarari-man as the third vowel is long vowel.

Is it a hyphen? Or would it be saraiiman? I actually don’t know.

Your form is correct based on faint recollection of what I learned in college Japanese class.

It shall be ー, but if we use that, we should also use rest of the kanas too.

That's the correct romanization of the Japanese word サラリーマン, which, according to the Wikipedia article on it, is a loanword whose usage dates back to before the 1930s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman

Clearly, there should have been a young brash Nintendo VP tearing the printed proposal in half, then in quarters, then in one eighths, until all is left is pieces falling like cherry blossoms, all the while looking at the MS exec in the eyes and making a five-minute impromptu address on what it means to be Nintendo and why money-counting accountants will never understand it, until the MS exec runs out of the room crying, punched by the sheer verbal force of the righteous anger.

Yes, everything I learned about Japan, I learned from Japanese dramas, why do you ask?

The Nintendo president Mr.Yamauchi at the time was very unique person. His personality can't be guess from Japanese stereotype.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com