

For Japanese Linguist, a Long and Lonely Schlep (2012) - dang
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/16/150723840/for-japanese-linguist-a-long-and-lonely-schlep

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patio11
Tangentially related: there's a good recent Japanese film, available with
English subtitles, called The Great Passage. It includes two intertwined love
stories, one between a man and a woman and one between two men and their
magnum opus, a new comprehensive Japanese dictionary, which takes decades to
complete.

Highly recommended if, for nothing else, a window into why at least some
salarymen feel like their sacrifices are worth it.

The film also explicitly asks and answers the question of why a publisher
would fund a decades-long quest to produce a work with very limited commercial
appeal (which this article might set you to wondering about): they're willing
to subsidize certain prestige projects with rent from being in the elite
fraternity of Japanese publishing houses, and capability of publishing new
dictionaries is a status marker for that. There are limits to this largesse
and they come a key subplot to the movie.

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wodenokoto
Jack halpern is quite an interesting character and I feel the article sells
him short when introducing him as a Japanese resident who speaks Yiddish.

He has worked on one of the major Japanese character dictionaries as editor in
chief and his company leases out databases of Chinese, Japanese and Korean
character and this data is used by many of the major publishers of
dictionaries. He has also published over 16 books. The guy is no stranger to
the hard work required to build such a dictionary.

More over he founded the unicycle foundation, which is responsible for the
World Cup of unicycling.

