Earlier today, I posted about Aso Farmland. Now I’d like to write a little note about a problem that comes up fairly regularly with foreign-language information in Japan: No links to the original Japanese-language information. Take this page as an example. The English page contains a link to itself (which merely refreshes the page) and to Chinese and Korean. However, there is no link to Japanese! I think this is the result of the assumption that foreigners ONLY need information in foreign languages. Even if one doesn’t understand Japanese, however, one might want to be able to send a Japanese friend a link to the Japanese information – particularly if there seems to be some sort of problem with the translation. I think the assumption behind this phenomenon is that non-Japanese live in a foreign-language bubble and couldn’t possibly find a way to make use of information in Japanese. I hope the day will come when more people recognize the importance of providing links from foreign-language translations to the original Japanese-language material.
By the way, the only way I could find to get to the original Japanese was to erase “lang/en/index.html” from the URL: