Welcome

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Hi. If you’ve come to this page, I imagine it’s because you were either interested or annoyed by something I wrote or a change I made—anyhow, that’s usually my motivation for visiting someone’s user page <g>.

I’m a translator working between Japanese and English, a profession I took up in 1984. I lived in Hachioji, a city in west Tokyo, from 1981 to 2017; since June, I live in Yamaguchi, my wife’s hometown.

Before coming to Japan in 1981 I lived for nearly five years in Germany, mostly in a town called Wolfenbüttel in Niedersachsen, but also in Hamburg and Pforzheim. I grew up in Riverton, New Jersey, a small town across the river from Philadelphia in the US.

My educational background is not very impressive: a vocational high school for grades 9–12, then an apprenticeship in Germany, where I trained (and then worked) as a Konditor, sort of a combination of confectioner and baker (Konditors don’t do bread). I originally came to Japan to go to college, but dropped out after three years to pursue my career in translation. The impending arrival of our first son kind of helped me reach the decision, too.

My interests are just about anything to do with Japan; German history (particularly the Nazi and post-war periods); typography, letter forms, and scripts; and languages; in my next life, I think I’d like to get into vulcanology or seismology and dispense with the cake baking. Anyhow, these are the areas where I hope to be able to contribute to Wikipedia. I’m also quite interested in Buddhism, particularly the Nichiren flavor(s), and believe I can be of help with describing or explaining terminology and concepts from particularly the Nichiren Shoshu school’s perspective (for the record: I believe that whether that perspective is viable or otherwise is for the reader to decide: my intent is to explain it, not promote it <g>).

Anyhow, thanks for stopping by.

Jim Lockhart 14:22, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC); updated 17 Jul 2017

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International Travels Brag Sheet

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Time spent in:
—years:   Japan (1981–)
  United States (1956–1976)
  Germany (1976–1981)
—days to months
(by aggregate lengths of stay):
  Canada
  France
  Netherlands
  South Korea
  East Germany
  Austria
  Belgium
  Switzerland
  Norway
  Portugal

Notes for self

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  • <span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Small Caps</span> for Small Caps
  • Here’s a preliminary map of JMA Seismic Intensities accompanying an M4.4 earthquake that took place at 26 Jan 14:16 JST at Nagomi, Kumamoto showing the distribution of intensities (note plural) across the affected area. The quake’s maximum intensity was a –5 (a “weak” or “lower” 5). As anyone with a functioning set of eyes can see, numerous intensities accompanied this quake: they vary by observation point; this is a good illustration of how a quake does not have “an” intensity, it has lots of them. Jim_Lockhart (talk) 07:34, 26 January 2019 (UTC)


Nihongo Template

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There is a template (Template:Nihongo) to help standardize the entries for Japanese terms: {{Nihongo|Eng|kanji_string|romanization if needed}} Usage example:

{{Nihongo|New Meikai Japanese Dictionary|新明解国語辞典|shinmeikai kokugo jiten}}

appears as

New Meikai Japanese Dictionary (新明解国語辞典, shinmeikai kokugo jiten)

The first entry appears before the brackets, the second is the Japanese term in Kanji and Kana, the last is the reading in Hepburn romanization. The question mark ? is a link to Help:Japanese.

Manual of style for Jpn articles: WP:MOS-JA

Language icons

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{{in lang|de}}: (in German)
{{in lang|ja}}: (in Japanese)
{{in lang|nl}}: (in Dutch)
{{in lang|pl}}: (in Polish)


Language reference templates

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{{lang-xx}}
de: German: Deutsch
pl: Polish: Polish
ja: Japanese: 日本語 Nihongo
nl: Dutch: Nederlands

With audio file: German: Breslau

Where are *.ogg files located? Any Japanese files available?

Message templates

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Images to use in user boxes

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User boxes I’ve built

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Use them if you like.