I recently bought a 2001 M1 Re-issue Glow Goji that comes bagged with a 342 page history book of Marusan & Bullmark.

Club Tokyo link to the Goji: http://tinyurl.com/5k5qyd

The book is mostly text and seems quite extensive. Underneath the book's front flap... I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was hand signed by what appears as two signatures.

I'm hoping someone here can tell me who signed it...or possibly translate what it says??

Thanks in advance if anyone can help out!

Book Jacket...


Signatures?

That's the signature of Saburo Ishizuki, one of the founders of Marusan and Bullmark. Matt Alt translated some material from this book and posted it on Toybox DX:

http://www.toyboxdx.com/infolibrary/tra ... hizuki.php

Another item about it here:

http://www.toyboxdx.com/rumble_archive/rum070201.html

Congrats on the pickup! Killer!

Roger...Thanks so much!

I'm really happy to have picked this book up...not that I can read it...though It does have some pretty interesting pics scattered throughout.

You know, I searched SB but completely forgot to check TDX

Really appreciate the links too!

I would really like to get this book translated to English and have been looking into translation services on the net.
There are plenty of Japanese to English translation services...but none of them really give any real idea of price. I'm thinking it will probably be fairly expensive.
I'm wondering if anyone has experience using this kind of service or has any idea of the cost in translating a book?

My guess is "very expensive" because it's a decent-sized paperback written for adults.

You could always ask Matt for an estimate of what professional translation would run:

http://www.altjapan.com/

Yeah Roger you're right... it will probably be exorbitant.

I just feel that of all the Japanese toy books out there... a book that chronicles the origins, history, and production of the toys we all collect really deserves an English translation. I know there would be a lot of interest in the book here...not that I could distribute it...though, I'm sure I could find a way to get copies to interested parties somehow

Thanks for the link again...I'll send out an email to AltJApan...and hopefully it actually reaches Matt Alt.

I'm going to try and get quotes from some other services as well. As soon as I get a better idea of pricing, I'll post it up here.

Regarding the level of interest in a book like that, you can talk with Matt about that, too (he was one of the authors of Super #1 Robot, which had an introduction by Saburo Ishizuki).

Well I heard back from Matt Alt already...what a nice guy I must add. I knew of him, and have a copy of Super #1 Robot, but had never really spoke with him before.

Anyways...here is an excerpt from his reply:

Unfortunately, it isn't really cost-effective to translate a book just for one reader. For one thing it is a really major project. Generally speaking translators are paid per Japanese character (kanji/hiragana/katakana), and you can see there are hundreds per page. Translating an entire book runs to the tens of thousands of dollars and takes many many months to complete. Then there's the copyright issue -- even if you own a translation I produced you would be breaking the law if you distributed it in any way, even online for free. So from a pure legal standpoint it would make more sense to try and convince a press to actually acquire the rights and publish the book before hiring me (or anyone) to translate it.

Well, 10's of thousands of dollars I really had no idea what this kind of thing would cost. In my little mind...I was thinking something like 1-2K US for a single copy translated for an individual. I would imagine if one did enough searching...you could find an individual Japanese speaker to translate for a much lower price.

I plan on holding on to this anyways, so we'll see what happens down the road.