KnI chapter 20 and announcement

Isaki makes it to Kouzu, but he (and co.) still have a ways to go before they reach Mt. Fuji. They're about halfway there.

This is the end of volume 3; Kabu no Isaki has ended in Japan at 6 volumes, so this also marks a halfway point in the series as a whole. When I started this project, I had no idea how far I would take it. Progress has been slow at times (okay, all the time) so I'm somewhat surprised that I've made it this far.

But enough navel-gazing. I'd like to announce that I'm dropping the project. With the exception of revisions to volumes 1 and 2, I don't expect to do any more work on this series. But before you despair, let me add that Roselia Scanlations will be taking up the reins. What's more, I expect them to release quite a bit faster than I ever would.

As for the overall status of [dou], various loose ends are being worked on. This year may end up being even more slowbro than ever, but we will see how it goes.

Kabu no Isaki chapter 19

Welp, here we go again. Almost done with volume 3.

Kabu no Isaki chapter 18

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I tried to find a pine forest in modern-day Chigasaki but I was not successful. By the way, zoom out on the Satellite imagery and gawk at how large the Tokyo metro area is.

Kabu no Isaki chapter 17

What's this? Less than a month between releases? I bet it's just a dream, no way that could happen.

Kabu no Isaki chapter 16

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Chapter sixteen, in which our intrepid protagonist sets off on a new adventure.

Kabu no Isaki chapter 15

Mt. Nokogiri, by wikipedia user Σ64

Well, here we go again. In the ten-times larger world of Kabu no Isaki, the merely spectacular becomes the mind-bogglingly stupendous. In this chapter, Mt. Nokogiri's cliffs are on display, as well as a more familiar sight...

Try some of the pictures from the geotagged picture map and imagine everything ten times bigger.

Kabu no Isaki chapter 14

Well, it's time to kick off volume 3. A big thanks to dosetsu and fireside for scanning and editing, respectively. I know this chapter still took me a while but it sure felt a lot easier to get through.

I elected not to put a note for Hayashi Rice this time, because it's evidently something mysterious and relatively exotic to our protagonists. I've never had it, but in my mind it's something like stroganoff over rice. Also, sorry to any ornithologists, but I replaced a mention of the Black Kite with just "hawk", which becomes wrong if you go far enough down the Kingdom/Phylum/etc classifications. Japanese has a bunch of colloquial names for rather specific species, for example all those darned beetles in Sketchbook, and it's hard to preserve the tone if you stick exactly to the script. In this case Isaki seems to free-associate from Kites (tonbi) to dragonflies (tonbo). Finally, the title of the chapter is an archaic term for dragonflies, akitsu.

Kabu no Isaki volume 1 re-do

I'd been meaning to re-do volume one of Kabu no Isaki someday, but you can thank Strange Scans for stepping up to speed along the process. You can find it over here; note that other parts of the blog may be NSFW.

So what's new about it? The translations in chapters 5 and 6 are fixed/improved, and while I didn't have the time to re-translate 1-4, some obvious things were corrected. The scans are new, and while I have some misgivings about the tone quality, it's an improvement overall. So once again, thanks to Strange Scans for pushing this along and doing the heavy lifting.

Kabu no Isaki chapter 13

At long last, the end of volume two.

I forgot what I was going to say. Probably something about the pace getting a little faster, but no promises, etc. Next on my list is finishing up Seireihen.

Kabu no Isaki chapter 12

I semi-tried to get this out before going on vacation, but it didn't happen.

In this chapter Ashinano is presumably riffing on the "Umihotaru" island that sits in the middle of the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line, a $10-billion-dollar public works project that consists of a bridge and tunnel connecting Kawasaki, on the western side of the bay, to Kisarazu, on the eastern side.


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Given the way this chapter goes, for a while I thought I had screwed up some dialogue in chapter 10, but now I think it makes sense... I'll have to double-check.

Kabu no Isaki chapter 11

I think this is my favorite chapter so far.


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We find ourselves in Kawagoe this chapter, which lies roughly 50 miles (80 km) north of the Miura peninsula, as the crow flies (in our world). Multiply those figures by ten and the trip becomes quite long; the Cub has a quoted range of 460 miles and a cruise speed of 115 mph.

There's a bit of a pun in the noodle shop's name: Isa Soba. Thanks go to a Japanese blog that pointed out how there's a lake in Kawagoe called Lake Isa. "Soba" can mean "buckwheat noodles" but it's also a homonym for "next to."

A lot of food gets mentioned in this chapter: eggplant tempura, squid tempura, soba zenzai, awamori, sata andagi, soba karinto. Damn, I get hungry just thinking about it.

Kabu no Isaki chapter 10

Well, here we go again.


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I was feeling facetious, so I asked Google for directions from Nagai to Kisarazu. It does just fine for ground routes, but as far as I know, there's no as-the-crow-flies distance measurement option. Using a ruler, I measured 30-odd kilometers in our world, which makes 330 km in KnI's world. [Addendum: Found the Ruler feature in Google Maps Labs; it measured 33.1 km.]

There was one sticking point in this chapter that I'm still not completely sure about. Isaki actually says "liaison aircraft" where I had him say "air courier." So what's a liaison aircraft? It's a small plane used for non-combat military purposes, like transport and reconnaissance. The Pitts Special is not a liaison aircraft, but the L-4 variant of the Cub (the "Grasshopper") is. So perhaps they were talking about the Cub, but the rest of the conversation doesn't make nearly as much sense that way. I might be wrong, though, so I'll come back to this if necessary.

Kabu no Isaki chapter 9

A bit of an adventure this time.

Kabu no Isaki chapter 8

Another peaceful visit to Shiro-san's shop.

Kabu no Isaki chapter 7

Nothing much to report. The project is moving along. Thanks to Soyokaze for doing the scans.

I've made the decision to stop doing the sound effects in this series, for several reasons. First is, I'm lazy. Second is, they're mostly plane sounds and you know what planes sound like. (Not to mention it's quite easy to find out what these particular planes really sound like.) I do have mixed feelings about leaving them out. I don't want to sound too weeaboo about this, but part of what makes the Japanese language rather suited to manga is its usage of onomatopoeia and related things. So I prefer to transliterate sound effects rather than substituting English equivalents. But at the same time, transliterations can be strange and distracting to readers of English. In this chapter, the Blacknoses go "ohhhh", which I interpret as some sort of hum. And in a later chapter, the Cub goes "bonyoyoyo", which I think you'll agree is pretty weird. To sum up, leaving them out altogether is a way of sidestepping the issues.

Of course, in scanlation nobody handles sfx the same way. It ranges from the hands off treatment (i.e. "learn the kana"), to putting a translation in the border/corner, to full-blown redrawing. Every approach has a drawback, I feel. We don't live in a perfect world, after all.

New project: Kabu no Isaki

This has been in the works for a while now. I won't have time until the weekend to write the blurb I've got planned, but for now, have some links.

Two weekends later, and here we are. I know I promised a blurb, but now I realize it might not be a particularly cohesive one. I'm no Herb Caen, but hell, let's give the Herb Caen format a shot.

KABU NO ISAKI: Hitoshi Ashinano's latest work, serialized in Kodansha's Afternoon magazine. It seems to run every other month, and currently there are two collected volumes out. It's about a young man, Isaki, who flies his neighbor's plane around.

TEN TIMES LARGER: For unclear reasons, the earth has become ten times larger. That's what the back cover of the manga says. So everything is ten times farther away than it used to be, and mountains are ten times taller. The Tokyo Tower is ten times taller, but it's unclear (to me at least) why and how the human habitations are still normally sized.

Shichirigahama from Inamuragasaki. By WP Commons user Urashimataro. Public Domain.

SHICHIRIGAHAMA: A beach that actually has an article on Wikipedia: Shichirigahama. Evidently it's a decent surfing spot. What's interesting, though, is that the place is literally named "Seven Ri Beach," where a ri is an archaic unit of measurement equal to 3.9 kilometers. Thus you would expect the beach to be 27 kilometers long, but as Wikipedia notes, it's only one-tenth of that length. Blow up the world by ten, though, and the name becomes accurate.

MOUNTAIN FLYING: In chapter six, Isaki catches some major air. From reading around, mountain flying is not for the faint of heart; and it probably killed Steve Fossett. A phenomenon that's particularly interesting (and particularly relevant to this chapter) is the so-called lee wave. Also known as mountain waves, these are wind currents that form downwind from a mountain range. Gliders catching such waves can attain amazing heights, reaching altitudes of tens of thousands of feet. Reading about these waves has been quite fascinating. First there's the Sierra Rotors Project, a NSF-funded study to determine the characteristics of the waves that form over the Owens Valley; as Shiro-san notes, they're not always there. Then we have writer Nate Ferguson's article on Soar Minden, an outfit closer to Lake Tahoe that puts you in a glider. (Naturally there are Youtube videos of everything these days.)

PIPER SUPER CUB: I don't know a whole lot about these planes, but the internet sure does. There's a Wikipedia article, as well as a surprisingly active enthusiast website. A few data points: introduced 1949, cruise speed 185 km/h / 115 mph, range 735 km / 460 mi.

GEOGRAPHY: Japanese geography is also something that I don't know a whole lot about. We have a few data points to work from. In the first chapter, Isaki flies to the Tokyo Tower, having just returned from Jogashima in the first pages. And in chapter six, Isaki and Shiro-san go to Shichirigahama.

That's a static map with locations pointed out. I haven't figured out how to get a dynamic map with multiple locations, but here's a dynamic one anyway.

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DISTANCE: Where do Isaki and company live? The most pertinent datapoint comes from chapter one, where Isaki says that he went 120 km roundtrip to Jogashima. That makes for 60 km one-way, which we then divide by ten to get the "unstretched" world distance. Looking at the map, the folks in KnI live somewhat north of Miura City, south of Mount Ōgusu. Café Alpha is somewhere around there too, as we can tell from chapter one of YKK:

PROJECT PLANS: Volume two is out, and I have it in hand. The plan is to read and translate the entire volume over winter break, and then start the editing process. I also would like to produce a HQ version of volume one, but naturally that's a lower priority.