Talk:Momoe Yamaguchi

Macrons
Since someone removed them after I'd added them, allow me to point out that the Japan-related manual of style asks us to put the macrons like "shōgeki" rather than "shougeki". --DannyWilde 01:55, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

aoi kajitsu
I don't know if there is a definite translation, but "blue fruit" is pretty weird. "Unripe fruit" is OK too, but if lots of variant translations get added, then the article will be getting very long. If you don't like Green Fruit, then maybe it's better to just remove the translation. --DannyWilde 22:54, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

Green fruit doesn't really tie into the song though. Blue fruit can imply rotteness, or mold, and thus leading to 'bad fruit'. And I think Unripe fruit seems the a good way for the translation, but that may be taking too much liberties on the word 'aoi'. Mizerunmei 01:07, 22 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Hi again, I thought you'd disappeared. Unripe fruit seems to be the meaning intended, doesn't it? Or it could be "young fruit", but maybe that is too risque. Momoe's biography is called "aoi toki". --DannyWilde 01:38, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Blue fruit is a "literal translation" which does not convey the meaning. The meaning is unripe fruit. Aoi can mean either blue or green, but for an english reader "green" conveys the meaning of unripe fruit where as "blue" is strange as mentioned - i think you are interpreting the lyrics of the song into the title. Best is "green fruit" or "unripe fruit". Domandologo 22:58, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Picture
It's a bit dry without even one picture of her. Does anyone have a fan picture they took which could be put in public domain? --Domandologo 23:03, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
 * She retired in 1980, and does not appear in public at all, so it is unlikely. The best possibility is a "fair use" of an old publicity photograph. JoshuSasori (talk) 05:46, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I see that is not allowed. JoshuSasori (talk) 12:26, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

films
In the bibliography it is stated that she starred in 17 movies, but the filmography at the bottom lists only 15. --Domandologo 23:23, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
 * One of them was commented out and one of them was under a subsection "performances". JoshuSasori (talk) 05:44, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Kaiten Mokuba
I removed the comment that Kaiten Mokuba was a children's song. The song is about a girl who meets a guy while walking on the beach, instantly falls in love and spends the night with him, they kiss, and more is implied. Definitely not a song a 13-year-old should be singing! Yaguchi (talk) 03:21, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Cleanup of titles
The titles of the singles and albums are a mess of half-romanization and half-translation. I think they should just be the romanizations of the titles since these albums and singles are unknown in English. Any opinions? JoshuSasori (talk) 06:13, 15 February 2012 (UTC)


 * You're right. -- Hoary (talk) 14:23, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

"Yamaguchi"
I don't know why the name was changed in the article to "Yamaguchi" but it sounds rather ignorant. JoshuSasori (talk) 23:21, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I tried to find some support in wikirules for this since calling her "Yamaguchi" sounds really odd, but only found the wikirules Surname which doesn't really allow for any exceptions. Anyway I put it back to Yamaguchi, although it sounds so wrong. JoshuSasori (talk) 00:44, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Practice here does allow for certain exceptions: I've moved back from "Yamaguchi" to "Momoe" when discussing her in the context of her family. But it doesn't allow for exceptions in order to reflect fan adulation or whatever. (Thus Elvis Presley is quite rightly referred to as "Presley", etc.) -- Hoary (talk) 02:19, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I can see this is a subtle point and I would agree with calling him "Presley" rather than "Elvis", so I guess that rule applies. Also she is always billed with her surname and first name on records or television. It just "feels wrong" to me, but I accept that this is the rule and will go along with it. JoshuSasori (talk) 02:21, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry but I'm going to ignore the rules and use common sense. Calling Momoe "Yamaguchi" just sounds so completely wrong I cannot live with it any more. The manual of style claims it allows for occasional exceptions, and surely this is one of them - a person in a country where everyone is called by their last name, who is only ever called by her first name. JoshuSasori (talk) 04:31, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
 * The problem with common sense is that it's subjective. My own common sense tells me that "Yamaguchi" is right for an encyclopedia ("Momoe" being intolerably adoring; cf "Reo-sama" for DiCaprio back when he was every Japanese girl's heartthrob). But I don't expect either of us to be dissuaded by the other's argumentum ad antiquitatem, and so I brought the matter up here. -- Hoary (talk) 07:05, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Conclusion: Following discussion on Wikiproject Japan, we decided to move back to Yamaguchi. JoshuSasori (talk) 01:06, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Reliable sourcing
No. The blurb on a book (or anyway its obi or wherever) may say that it has sold so many copies. But such a claim needs a reliable source, which of course must be disinterested, and this obviously is not disinterested.

You mention Japanese-language Wikipedia (ja:WP). This is better regarded as near worthless. Reliable sourcing in it is rare, although its featured articles show that the concept isn't alien. Still, ja:WP is handy for the way it puts forward assertions that can be checked elsewhere, and IFF verified then inserted. (Example.) -- Hoary (talk) 02:53, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't even know how to go about finding what book sales are for Japanese books. I have tried many different web searches but there is nothing popping out at me. JoshuSasori (talk) 03:25, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
 * My sympathies: what's happened is that you've stumbled against the sad reality of the Japanese-language interwebs. Mostly junk (for this kind of purpose, at least), if with a few blogs that look as if they might have been put together conscientiously, though unless we have independent evidence for their quality we can't cite any of them either. In response to a request on my user talk page, I've just now made a hurried attempt to find some citable evidence for this confection. Since this stars a perennial heartthrob in his youth, there are of course screenfuls of hits for it. They all look like junk. Google News? Zero. Google Books? Zero. Time willing, one should go to the library and look in the (web-based, but expensive) database of Asahi, Yomiuri or Mainichi. Or of course look in some book. -- Hoary (talk) 03:48, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

references for singles / albums
E.g. http://www.momoeworld.com/singer.htm

http://www.sonymusic.co.jp/Music/Info/momoe/disco/index.html

these are just the links in the bottom of the page. I'm not going to add individual references for each single. JoshuSasori (talk) 12:29, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Joey Yung and china citations
Joey Yung is basically just an illustration of her popularity in China. There are lots more things which could be added here. Joey Yung's song is not really important. Unfortunately the best citation at the moement for the popularity in china is the youtube interview with ryudo uzaki. JoshuSasori (talk) 14:40, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I think the youtube interview is from about 1999 and it was broadcast on NHK. I haven't been able to find evidence for the programme's broadcast though. JoshuSasori (talk) 00:14, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I deleted Joey Yung since this is very recent song and maybe not important. JoshuSasori (talk) 01:08, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Seeing red

 * However, the final Akai program, Akai Shisen, was a two-part story starring her and Tomokazu Miura based on a novel, Deadline at Dawn, which used only the Akai name.

Small point: Deadline at Dawn points to a movie, not a novel. That aside, I'm very puzzled. A wild, utterly uninformed guess:


 * However, the final Akai program, Akai Shisen, was a two-part story starring her and Tomokazu Miura, and was based on a novel, Deadline at Dawn, whose Japanese title ([insert here]) does not include akai.''

But even if this happens to be correct, it's awkward. (Was it titled with akai just because viewers had come to expect akai? For that matter, why all this redness?) -- Hoary (talk) 01:52, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Deadline at dawn is the book not the film and it says so on the credits of the TV program along with the writer of the book, whom I have forgotten. I don't know the origin of the "red", although my guess is that it is the red of blood as in "blood relations", or maybe just a handy brand for Momoe and Ken Utsui's melodramas. You may notice that generally these feature a young woman in an unfortunate or tragic situation, which reflects Momoe's real life and also her "dark" or "gloomy" persona. However, I don't have a refernece or citation s for those things. JoshuSasori (talk) 02:04, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * ja:WP (not a reliable source, of course) makes it clear that this is the novel by "William Irish" the title of whose translation is 暁の視線. The first character is read as akatsuki (meaning "dawn"); this is of course the same aka as that in akai (red), even if a different Sino-Japanese character is used for it. I've elaborated accordingly. The result probably looks pedantic but I think it's clearer. But of course it all needs a proper source. -- Hoary (talk) 03:16, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I think it's speculative (original research) to say that it is the same "aka". Also that programme seems to be considered part of the "akai" series. JoshuSasori (talk) 06:52, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * OK. Morphology and etymology aren't the same, and dictionaries of Japanese are most unlikely to venture beyond etymology. So let's not get into morphology. Well, there are the same two moras アカ in 暁 (this one) and 赤い (the others), and the article need say no more than this (or indeed use the term "mora"). -- Hoary (talk) 11:12, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * It seems like it's a speculation but even if not, as with the kanji thing it is an article whose topic is a singer, so those kinds of very detailed points don't really need to be gone into. The only reason I added that note on the character was because I couldn't find the Joey Yung song on Youtube searching for "joey yung 山口百恵" and I noticed that the last one was different, so I thought it might be worth pointing out. Whether it's traditional or simplified or itaiji or whatever doesn't really matter, in an article about a singer. JoshuSasori (talk) 13:17, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Shinken

 * the right of parental authority, shinken (親権)

Why not just the right of parental authority (or indeed parental authority or something simpler?

Japanese terminology/script where helpful, of course, but it seems to be proliferating in this article and I don't always know why. (I'd also remove the Japanese script from the main text when naming her singles, movies, etc, given that the Japanese script [rightly] appears within the relevant list nearer the foot.) -- Hoary (talk) 03:16, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * First of all, I don't think Japanese script is proliferating in this article. I opened this wikipedia account on 1 February 2012 and since then I have done many of the edits on the Momoe article, and if you look at a version of the article from before then compared to now, you might notice that there is very much less Japanese script than there was before. In the case of this word, if the legal case is based around some Japanese concept then I think the Japanese word is necessary. The information I have on this case is mostly from the book which Momoe wrote, which is all in Japanese and the "right of parental authority" is a translation which I have offered based on what I found at WWWJDIC. You're very welcome to alter this if you want to, as you see fit. JoshuSasori (talk) 06:51, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Sorry, "proliferating" was poorly chosen. I didn't mean that it was growing (or that you were adding to its total), I meant that there was a lot of it. &para; Well, let's leave shinken (親権), at least for now. But what do you think about song titles, etc, in the body of the article (as opposed to the lists? &para; If you have the book by Yamaguchi, excellent. Could you please add page numbers to your notes in which you cite it? This would of course be in order to help would-be readers of it, but also in order to avoid somebody's later addition of this unsightly template. -- Hoary (talk) 10:28, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I think it's OK to remove whatever seems excessive. I didn't write the main text of the article, which was originally written a bit like a fan page with some opinions about the various bits of music, and the kanji versions and the analysis of the lyrics of the "Hito Natsu" song, and the "cultural historians" - honestly a lot of this could just be removed. Actually I have removed some of it. Adding the page nmbers sounds like a lot of work. JoshuSasori (talk) 13:11, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, you have a copy of the book, and you know what's where within it, and the pages have numbers on them. -- Hoary (talk) 13:23, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * On the other hand, I've already done an awful lot of work on this article, which basically was almost unchanged for seven years, and I won't receive a penny in payment, so asking me to do hours of unpaid work tracking down page numbers in a book seems a bit much to me. Maybe people who need the exact page numbers would be kind enough to get a copy of the book and add the page numbers themselves, rather than trying to get me to do this kind of work for them. JoshuSasori (talk) 06:30, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Recognition in China
I have added a note to the Japanese wikipedia article asking for some proof about the survey of Chinese people. JoshuSasori (talk) 06:42, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

惠 and 恵
I wrote:
 * In China she is known as 山口百惠 (whose last character is the traditional version of that used in Japan).

But blammo!

The entry for 恵 on p.824 of the kan-wa jiten 『新潮日本語漢字辞典』 (東京：新潮社、2007; ISBN 978-4-10-730215-1) clearly says that 惠 is a 旧字 for it. (惠 also appears on p.836, but doesn't get a proper entry; it's only a cross-reference to 恵.) If I understand correctly (and I can't claim familiarity with this dictionary), 惠 is now authorized by Monkashō for use in personal names (which I hadn't realized), but only there. As for the status of 惠 in Chinese, I realize that her name is written 山口百惠 even on the mainland, but is there really no simplified Chinese version of 惠? (I don't have a Chinese character dictionary with me now.) -- Hoary (talk) 10:56, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure why it really matters - the article is about a singer so why go into so many details about writing systems? JoshuSasori (talk) 13:08, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure myself. But the reader now learns In China she is known as 山口百惠 (the final character is slightly different to that used in Japan). This is romanized as "Shan Kou Bai Hui". This looks a bit of a tease: the reader might well wonder why the Chinese write it differently. (Also, rather than "romanized as", how about "pronounced"?) -- Hoary (talk) 00:23, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Generally speaking, if the article is going to assert that she is famous in China, then perhaps it's useful to point out what she's called in Chinese, but perhaps that information is not really important. There were a whole raft of her films released on DVD in Hong Kong with English and Cantonese subtitles but I can't seem to find the link. I am floundering a bit in how to discuss this since most of the information I have about her being popular in China is from the YouTube interview referenced at the bottom of the page and from Google searches. I don't actually have the name of the TV programme it is from or its date. JoshuSasori (talk) 01:45, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Macronized names
According to the manual of style for names of modern figures, the first rule is to reflect the usage of the person professionally or personally. Both Ryudo Uzaki and Yoko Aki have their own official websites, and it's clear from the very top page of the websites that neither of them uses a macron in their name. JoshuSasori (talk) 01:55, 29 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Yes, you're right. But NB what MoS-JA says: This guideline is a part of the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style. Use common sense in applying it; it will have occasional exceptions. The example given there is of "Junichiro Koizumi", a name that's likely to appear in WP together with such names as George W. Bush. By contrast, Uzaki and Aki appear here in a Japanese context, together with the names of plenty of people, songs, movies, etc that get the right spelling (or as close as clunky old Hepburn can approximate this): "Kōhaku Uta Gassen" and so forth. The reader, seeing "Kōhaku' (etc), is likely to infer that macrons are used here wherever (i) they're appropriate and (ii) their use would look very pedantic (thus "Tokyo" rather than "Tōkyō", etc) -- and thus that "Ryudo" and "Yoko" stand for リュド and ヨコ, which of course they don't. I don't think that many readers of this article will have heard of Uzaki or Aki, however their names might be spelled: whereas "Tōkyō" might jar, "Ryūdo Uzaki" won't. So all in all, within this article, "Ryūdo Uzaki" seemed a good idea to me. By contrast, writing "Ryudo Uzaki" and "Yoko Aki", while entirely proper according to MOS-JA, would result in a mixture of short vowels that of course don't need macrons, long vowels as clearly indicated by macrons, and long vowels written as if they were short according to this or that person's preference; I really think that my approach is better. What do you think? -- Hoary (talk) 13:14, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * In the article about Ryudo Uzaki, sure we should give his name in correct romanization and kanji (and some articles like Hirohito even include some phonetics) but I don't think it's necessary to go into details about that in this article. Some people might be confused, most people surely won't care, and of the confused people, the ones who want to know exactly how to pronounce Ryudo Uzaki's name can go to the specific article and get the details there. Incidentally I used to work for a very large Japanese organization, and we never used macrons on people's names. I actually don't know of even one Japanese person who uses them. The closest I can think of is Sin-Itiro Tomonaga who I believe insisted on a circumflex on the final "o" of his name. And there Wikipedia doesn't even follow his wishes according to the rules. JoshuSasori (talk) 13:48, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Certainly Japanese organizations large and small care little about romanization. Indeed, the typical Japanese person often seems to think that the romanized form is whatever works in a FEP to get the Japanese script: thus we see "Sinnjyuku" (新宿) etc. -- Hoary (talk) 14:56, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Any large organization with a clue probably does care quite a lot about romanization. Toshiba don't call themselves Tousiba or Tōshiba. The place I worked for (quasi-governmental org) was full of eccentrics who all had their own ideas about how to write things in English, but still nobody used a macron. Local governments nowadays have settled on a form of romanization without macrons, whereas most railway companies still use the macrons. Primary school children are taught a form of romanization with circumflexes and "Si/Tu/" etc. But I've never met a single Japanese individual who uses a macron to write their name. Not even one. JoshuSasori (talk) 04:33, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
 * All right, large, clueful organizations probably do care quite a lot about romanization. However, they care little about romanization standards. And anyway, this not a Japanese organization (clueful or otherwise) but an encyclopedia. A romanization system with circumflexes and "si" is one or other form of ISO 3602; I happen to think that it's good, but of course it's helpless in the face of ティ, フォ, and so on, and anyway it's not what WP uses. -- Hoary (talk) 12:51, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

be silent or beauty silent
Re "Be Silent" or "Beauty Silent", there is a live performance on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JliGeBoxtgQ I've also taken a liberty with translating "ai no arashi" as "jealousy storm" for reasons which hopefully are obvious after listening to the song. JoshuSasori (talk) 04:25, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

And here is another one, with subtitles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCkag0ExQj0. JoshuSasori (talk) 05:05, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

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