Japanese Episode 20

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Japanese Episode 20

Japanese Episode 20: "Yuurei Pokemon to Natsumatsuri"

("Ghost Pokemon and the Summer Festival")

The ghost of a young maiden, waiting for her lover to return, has started appearing during the Summer Festival. The phantom maiden makes any man who sees her fall in love with her, and Takeshi and Kojirou fall for her spell. Satoshi, Kasumi, Pikachu, Musashi, and Nyasu seek the aid of a local woman, who tells them how to confront the ghost. The time comes, and the ghost appears, revealing itself to be the pokemon Ghosu. The pokemon is super-strong and looks like it has our heroes beat until the sun comes up. The ghost pokemon cowers with the approach of morning, and leaves the town until the next summer. Satoshi-tachi join the Summer festivities, having learned more about ghost pokemon.

Thoughts
This is another episode I liked. The very beginning, before the title screen, is a great way to begin an episode, and I wish the animators were more creative like this. Oh well. This episode also features one of my all-time favorite performances of the Rocket-Dan motto, though I think the number one position goes to the Imite episode. Anyway, the only negative thing about this episode was 4Kids insistence on deleting anything Japanese about the show. The cultural cover-ups get really annoying in this episode, as if viewers couldn’t tell by now that this show was made in Japan. I mean, the fact that Satoshi-tachi are attending a Natsumatsuri ("Summer Festival") should be a signal to kids that this show's from the East. If you want to look at pictures of a Summer Festival (which is actually given at the beginning of summer, incidentally), click here.

Paint Edit
Festivals=writing. Therefore, 4Kids gets their digital paint to work. The establishing shot of the festivities have a Purin ballon with “Pokemon something-or-other” (it’s really hard to read because it’s so small and kind of fuzzy) and a banner on the left side of the screen that says Ringo Ame (“Apple Candies”). Both were wiped clean by 4Kids.

Paint Edit
When the Old Woman first appears and says “Who’s not beautiful!?,” there’s a sign behind her that says “-nko something-in-kanji.” That awful Japanese writing is erased for your safety.

Paint Edit
Wow! James found a penny on the ground! Yeah, right. It was actually a 5 en piece (which isn’t worth much more than a penny) that he picks up, but 4Kids painted a penny over it. The penny really looks rather good, and it even sparkles at the same place as the 5 en piece. The only problem is that in all the other shots that show Kojirou holding the en piece, you can still see the hole that’s in the middle (Japanese coins have holes in the middle of them). I wonder how many kids were wondering why James' penny has a hole in the middle?

The edit shouldn't have had to occur because Kojirou shouldn't have found an en piece to begin with. The people in the Pocket Monsters games don't use American dollars or Japanese en--they use a different currency. I don't recall if this "pokemon currency" was given a name or not, but the anime producers seem to have forgotten that.

Music Edit
When the ghost of the maiden is walking around, the Japanese version plays the music from Shion Town, updated for the anime. The anime version is really neat, and unfortunately this is the only episode we get to hear it in. The dub replaces this with some of its own music, and it really isn’t the same. You have to hear it for yourself to see what you’re missing out on.

Side Note
The Old Woman (couldn’t they have given her a name!?) says:

Old Woman: “All men who pass this way fall under her spell.”

And yet Satoshi isn’t affected at all throughout this whole episode. So either he hasn’t noticed girls yet (he’s only ten), or maybe…

Nah, I won’t say anything. I don’t want to upset all you Ash-Misty people out there ^_-

Side Note
I’m sure you noticed all the blank signs around the maiden’s shrine, right? And I’ll bet you’re just waiting for me to tell you that there was tons of Japanese writing all over the place, and that 4Kids really put their digital paint to work. Right? Right?! Not at all. The fact is, there’s just as much Japanese writing in the dubbed shrine as there is in the Japanese one. I mean, there should be a lot of kanji around the place for 4Kids to paint over, but there isn’t. It’s really weird. But I really shouldn’t complain, since 4Kids didn’t mess up any shots of the shrine, but I just thought I’d mention it for all you wondering where all the writing is.

Dialogue Edit
Here’s where the cultural cover-ups get annoying…

Old Woman: “We have stickers! These are anti-ghost stickers.”

“Stickers!?” Stickers!? They’re putting up scrolls all over the place and are calling them STICKERS!? Come on! Why can’t you just say “scrolls!?” Is that too religious? Is the fact that Satoshi-tachi are putting anti-ghost scrolls all over the place somehow offensive or violent or sexual? Can you imagine how Sailor Moon would have ended up if 4Kids had gotten the rights to it (“Rei, use your stickers to stop the monsters!”)!?

Seriously, it's a really dumb cover-up, and there are times I wish 4Kids would listen to themselves to see how ridiculous they sound.

Paint Edit
The ball that Ghosu makes for Nyasu to play with has matatabi ("catnip") written in hiragana on the white stripe. It’s taken off by the magic of digital paint. Oddly enough, the word matatabi wasn't in any of my dictionaries--I found out what it meant from an issue of Mangajin that had a What's Michael? manga in it. And for some reason, every time the word appears in that manga, it's written in katakana, not in hiragana the way it is in Pocket Monsters.

Consequently, the fire extinguisher Ghosu creates to scare Hitokage keeps the kanji it has on it in the dub--the word shoukaki (fire extinguisher). Yeah, I’m confused too.

Side Note
The mongoose that Ghosu calls forth to scare Arbo doesn’t say “Dinner Time” in the Japanese version the way it does in the dub--it just says “Mongoose~!,” as if it were a pokemon. You know, they should have a mongoose pokemon, and Satoshi should get one so that Musashi won’t keep using Arbok on him all the time.

Music Edit
During the final scene of the festival, the Japanese version has a crude version of Pokemon Ondo playing in the background. It’s not the CD version, but a version sung by some random guy who really can’t sing all that well--he sounds like he’s drunk or something. This song is taken out, just leaving in the sound of the Japanese drums that Musashi-tachi are beating.

Paint Edit
When we first see Kasumi in her spiffy kimono, she’s holding a fan with the kanji for suzu (as in suzushii, or “cool” in English) on it. The fan Misty’s holding has the kanji erased.

What the @#$%!? I really really don’t follow 4Kids on this one. Even if I was going to consider that, for just a minute, that the deletion of Japanese characters in Pokemon is to make the show more American made sense, I can’t believe that’s why they painted the symbol out this time. Sure, they took out the Japanese writing in that shot. But everything else is so BLARINGLY JAPANESE!!! Americans don’t wear kimono! Americans don’t celebrate Japanese holidays by dancing to the sound of Japanese drums beating out centuries-old rhythms. And Americans don’t spend their summers in an outdoor shrine decorated with Japanese paper lanterns. If they really wanted to make the scene more “American,” they should have just completely redrawn it! Seriously, anything short of that retains all the Japanese-ness of the scene. And since no dubbing company is going to redraw an entire scene, then they should have just kept it as-is, kanji and all. I mean really, what’s the point of taking out one minor Japanese aspect of a scene? It doesn’t make the rest of it any less Japanese.

Come on, 4Kids. Japanese isn’t some evil occult language. American children can handle it--look at the popularity of programs like Sailor Moon and the Tenchi series. Both shows are oozing with Japanese writing and cultural references (especially the Tenchi shows), and they’ve enjoyed immense popularity. Before you automatically erase a kanji symbol, think about it--will doing so REALLY be worth the time, money, and effort?

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