We start off this week seeing Mari being a darling and being a one-girl cavalry.
The training of the new members gets underway, and Ezoe finally gets his long-awaited meeting with the prime minister.
It seemed like a new balance of progression on both the DB front and the world front.
Hope you enjoyed it!
As always, here’s the map, and here’s the chapter.
As always, warning about minor spoilers below, so go read it first!
And here are this week’s notes:
- Tachiai and kachiage are both sumo terms, with the definition pretty much covered in-text.
- I have no idea why the “Unmovable Leather Boots” came from the Item Gacha. I’ve been told there were also boots treated as an item in a Zelda game.
- “Shinto Mugen-style Staff Arts” is a reference to Shinto Musou-ryu, an actual traditional school of staff arts.
The poem attributed to them here is a real poem of this school (yay for translating old Japanese). - “Ruyi Bang” is a reference to the Ruyi Jingu Bang (如意金箍棒). As mentioned in-text, this was the weapon wielded by Sun Wukong in the tale Journey to the West. It can shrink and expand at will.
- The “gùn art” that Liu Fengguang displayed was Chinese staff art (so, not guns as in gunpowder guns).
- “Certain hermit in a popular shonen manga” is a reference to Master Roshi, who seemed fond of shouldering turtle shells as weight training.
- “Otemachi Twin Towers” is a reference to Otemachi 1st Square, which does actually have a twin tower design.
- “Regal Office Service” is a reference to Regus Group, which manages the office spaces in Otemachi 1st Square.
- Lounge ROCO: Mentioned at the start of Vol 1. They didn’t have a website back then, but they do now!
- New characters:
Yamashita Ayumi – in charge of accounting at Dungeon Busters, Inc.
Kashiwagi Reina – in charge of admin at Dungeon Busters, Inc. (and is the woman who Ezoe handed his watch to when Yokohama Dungeon first appeared; pretty cool throwback!) - Not new character, but Man in Venisuela is clearly up to no good.
- The Prime Minister’s Award (内閣総理大臣顕彰): The in-text introduction was pretty thorough. The “first-ever seven-title-holder of go” was Iyama Yuta, whereas the “first-ever seven-title-holder of shogi” was Habu Yoshiharu. (Cool trivia: They both also did receive the People’s Honor Award for the same achievement.) Although the text mentions that this award is “given out to roughly two people each year,” this is untrue; the five most recent awards were given out in 2020, 2017, 2016, 2010, and 2009.
- The People’s Honor Award (国民栄誉賞): The in-text introduction was pretty thorough. The very first recipient of this award was Oh Sadaharu, who broke the world home-run record.
- New countries:
Namviet = Vietnam
Muangtai = Thailand (Interesting fact: The Thai refer to Thailand as “Mueang Thai,” which is often transliterated as Muang Thai.) - Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model: An actual tool for evaluating the performance of a company, though Ezoe only seems to mention it in passing rather than actually getting into it here.
And it is with that cliffhanger that I leave you guys this week.
Look forward to the actual meeting between Isaac and Ezoe haha, it’s pretty good.
Seeya guys again next week!
(As always, feel free to point out grammatical mistakes, typos, and the like on either the relevant JNC forum or on the #translation-talk channel on our Discord.)