(the) Road to the Deep East

According to sankei, Japanese film industry is now troubled with a huge problem. It's a subtitle of imported movies.

It was 1931 that subtitled movie started in Japan. It was American movie, 'Morocco' , people at that time couldn't prepare the facilities for dubbing, and subtitles were used just to help in the crisis. But this first subtitled movie became a hit, and subtitles became a common way to run the Western movies in Japan.

Japanese common people are traditionally bookish people, who had been enjoying reading novels for 300 years, so this style was not so disturbing, and people had been enjoying the movie by reading the subtitles.

However, recently, thanks to the young people who don't read books , film industry has to change the style of subtitles. Reducing the letters, don't use kanji(Chinese characters) as less as possible, and using many hiraganas at its side.

According to the film distributors, before WW2, 3 lines of 13 letters were displayed altogether on the screen. After the WW2, it was remodel 2 lines of 10 letters because it was thought to be the maximum that people can actually catch up. In 1980, it was remodeled again for TV or videos, 2 lines of 13 letters.

But now, not a few people can't read 13 letters in one scene, so distributors are reducing
the number of letters. And in the end, the dubbed version is ran more frequently for the recent works. Especially, this tendency is clearer in the move for the young people. As for Harry Potter series, over 60% of shows are dubbed one.

And the film industry has another problem of young generation. The lack of basical knowledge. When they had a preview of a history movie , some young audience asked: 'What is Soviet? What is Nazi?'

(original article)
http://sankei.jp.msn.com/entertainments/entertainers/080510/tnr0805101825007-n1.htm

--
Is this another evidence of degenerated young Japanese caused by the infamous yutori education?

Japanese educational system changed in 1990,and the contents of each subjects were reduced to allocated more free time to students. It is what is called 'yutori(relaxed) education. It was designed to motivate students to do more extracurricular activities, but in reality, it looks the increased free times are just spent for Nintendo DS or mobile phone mails.

I think it is not so strange young people don't know about Soviet or Nazi, though. Different from when we were young, for the young generation, Soviet Union or Nazi Germany is just a nations collapsed before they were born. So, just like ancient dynasties of China, for the young people, they are just legends written only in text books.

But the vanishment of bookishness is a huge problem. Bookishness is one of the character of Japanese culture, and it had been a driving force of Japanese economic growth. It was this bookishness which enabled Japanese to absorb Western developed technology and system after Meiji Restoration 140 years ago.

And now, recent Japanese can't even 10 letters in few seconds in the movie. And the less the subtitles becomes, the less the things we can learn from the movie also becomes. It's a crisis. It's a deflation spiral of knowledge.

Meanwhile, Japanese 'English' educational system is getting better recently, and it's more realistic than before. Decades ago, Japanese English teachers only teach how to write and read the phrase like 'this is a pen', but recently, they teach how to speak and listen it, and students can also learn there's no place to use 'this is a pen' in reality. So, some educated young people can learn a lot from the movies even if the letters of subtitles were reduced, regarding English ones.

But English is not the only language used in the good movies in the world. For all the people who love movies, Japanese government should encourage students to read more books to increase the number of letters in subtitles again. Even if yutories read only light novels like Suzumiya Haruhi series without reading Mishima or Kawabata then, it won't be a huge problem. It's sure they include more than 13 letters.