Kindaichi Shonen no Jikenbo - Case Series - Vol. 7 Ch. 10 - The Truth 1 - Winner of the Race

[MangaDex]

 

[SlingToken]

Even if this riddle answer is correct, what kind of fool would go through this absurd process rather than just unscramble the 5 letter word manually.

 

[Nintendocat]

@SlingToken It might not be as simple in Japanese as it is in English. The 4th mystery of the original series had a similar thing happen where it depended on Japanese keyboards and wouldn't make sense in English so they added an explanation page telling how it worked in the original. Maybe not since it's a fan translation but this would still likely be a matter of Japanese characters instead of English letters.

 

[solchimes]

I knew it! It's weird when they work together lol

 

[Cerisine]

@solchimes weird but also weirdly hype

 

[bagoes]

@nintendocat I recall it was during the School Seven Mysteries right?
@SlingToken as @nintendocat mention, if it was written in Katakana, the letter would be Ta O Ko E I and it wouldn't make sense
that's why it would be easy if it was written in Latin alphabet

 

[Nintendocat]

@bagoes Yes, that was the one. For anyone interested, the English volume added an extra comic to the end reusing previous panels explaining that the solution was slightly different in the original version because it required the functions of a Japanese keyboard. I personally don't have any experience with Japanese keyboards and they might function differently now but this is how the explanation for how they worked in 1993.

Keyboards in Japan can type in 3 different modes: Hiragana, Katakana, and Romanji. That would mean that you could type hitting the same keys but get different words depending on which mode it was in similar to how hitting the shift key changes our numbers keys into symbols. In the mystery, it says that the first clue was 'no chi' written in either Hiragana or Katakana (they only show the roman in the English version even in the explanation) which on the keyboard in Romanji mode would be 'K' on the 'No' key and 'A' on the 'Chi' key making it write out as 'Ka'. So taking that process for all of the words would change the words into the message the leader of the club was trying to convey.

Since English keyboards only have one letter per key, that explanation doesn't work so they just had her make a cryptogram that needed to be put through a word processor and that some use of capitalization would cause it to have different effects on the code making out the message.

 

[Ynneja]

@Nintendocat: I remember that! I thought how clever the translator was in relaying the same sense of "cryptography" for English speakers.

 

[andrewwong36]

Too bad Kindaichi didn't get the castle....

 

[bagoes]

@nintendocat unfortunately the printed volume in my country that I read and the one uploaded here don't use another message, they just use the exact same trick that's used in the original file.
That makes me curious of the "cryptography" made by the English translator because I'm sure it must've quite hard to make one