Kirk here posting again about an exhibition at the Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art. Here’s a machine translation of the original Japanese-language information about the exhibition:
Miyabi: The history and the beauty of the Hosokawa collection https://www.pref.kumamoto.jp.e.qp.hp.transer.com/site/museum/129243.html
And here’s the original Japanese: https://www.pref.kumamoto.jp/site/museum/129243.html
My previous post focused on a very famous sword that is being displayed as part of the exhibition: https://www.facebook.com/Kumamotoi/posts/pfbid02UE5iYdf2u3aKNcavnmzZiJkzpKqibZRQqWJKMTGeTa3wwYGykeqmkHtjhP7RUQrql
This sword can only be seen in Part I of the exhibition which ends on September 25th.
Note regarding how I found the machine translation of this page: The prefecture doesn’t provide direct links between the original Japanese pages and their machine translations on their website. Unless you know a little trick, you have to go to the very entry point on the site and try to navigate the labyrinth to page (good luck!). I’ve learned, however, that inserting .e.qp.hp.transer.com before the first slash on a Japanese page will produce an English machine translation. Conversely, if you want to get to the original Japanese from a translation on this site, just remove that text string from the URL. This removal and addition of text to a URL is super easy for programers to do. So why didn’t they make it standard? It seems that there are large numbers of people in Japan (not just Kumamoto) who simply can’t imagine why English speakers who live in Japan would have any use for Japanese. :( I think that there are two assumptions involved: (1) Japanese is too damn hard for us and (2) we live in foreign bubbles and have no need to communicate with Japanese people about information we come across in English.
But, on a more positive note, I got the city to fix their website: https://www.facebook.com/Kumamotoi/posts/pfbid0GrfwCuptziq
Next target: The prefecture!