Mii-chan and Yamada-san - Vol. 2 Ch. 11.2
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As I continue to suffer, so must you guys.
Maybe a little TMI in the notes, I dunno, but I just felt like since it's relatively serious subject matter, I should emphasise I'm really not doing this for the lulz/I'm trying to treat it as respectfully as I can. Anyway, shouldn't be any really bad mistakes - there were only a couple of lines I really struggled with (Suzaki talking to herself on the final couple of pages was pretty tough) but if worst comes to the worst I think I still got the gist of it.
Maybe a little TMI in the notes, I dunno, but I just felt like since it's relatively serious subject matter, I should emphasise I'm really not doing this for the lulz/I'm trying to treat it as respectfully as I can. Anyway, shouldn't be any really bad mistakes - there were only a couple of lines I really struggled with (Suzaki talking to herself on the final couple of pages was pretty tough) but if worst comes to the worst I think I still got the gist of it.
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I thought the grandma was the only one with some sense, but she's too selfish and overly conscious to actually care for Mii-chan. The one time Mii-chan had a chance to find someone who cared and improve her situation, her family steps in and ruins it. It sadly makes sense that she ended up where she did...
Thank you for the translation, you always do a great job and despite such a difficult topic it was very well conveyed and a good read!
Thank you for the translation, you always do a great job and despite such a difficult topic it was very well conveyed and a good read!
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you really put a lot of thought and care into scripting the translation, I thank you for that
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Thank you for the translation.
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This is just frustrating. I feel bad for Mii-chan; she has essentially been fucked out of most help she could have gotten and is given a shitty mindset towards her disability by here mother.
Good god... I can... empathize with Yamada quite a bit...
This manga hits too close to home. It's horrifying. I am close friends (?) with someone whose entire family (including them) needs varying degrees of help for all kinds of neuro-developmental disorders. One of them behaves exactly like Mii-chan and may only be slightly better. They have a "moderate intellectual disability" diagnosis (I still don't fully understand the medical/biological reasoning behind the Japanese classification system and I find it somewhat vague?) and the only good thing may be that they weren't taken sexual advantage of like Mii-chan was, because that's something I've worried about when it came to this friend, too. And yes, their family also has characters like the grandmother here, though not as harmful. Afaik, there was also no incest involved.
This manga hits too close to home. It's horrifying. I am close friends (?) with someone whose entire family (including them) needs varying degrees of help for all kinds of neuro-developmental disorders. One of them behaves exactly like Mii-chan and may only be slightly better. They have a "moderate intellectual disability" diagnosis (I still don't fully understand the medical/biological reasoning behind the Japanese classification system and I find it somewhat vague?) and the only good thing may be that they weren't taken sexual advantage of like Mii-chan was, because that's something I've worried about when it came to this friend, too. And yes, their family also has characters like the grandmother here, though not as harmful. Afaik, there was also no incest involved.
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screw her family for sure but wdym you can't give any sympathy to mii-chan?
Jesus fuck. Your son fuck your daughter, "grandma", the fuck you mean about saving face you dumb hag. The face is already in the fucking ditch. The teacher really should have call Child Protection service on that fucking family, or whatever their Japanese equivalent is.
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I cannot justify it further, I lack the empathy or the mental connexions to relate to her condition.
It is might be like a Peter-Griffin-says-he-didnt-liked-the-Godfather moment of me
Thinking about it a tad more deeply, the reason might be:
I had the displeasure to live with clinically retarded ex-step-siblings.
It was extremely annoying, it drained my energies when I needed it the most + might drained my empathy for mentally challenged kids for at least 2 decades
Great portrail of mentally disabled kids in common life tho
btw why your profile says banned?
Well, I don't think you need to have connection to feel sympathy for someone, at least for me.I cannot justify it further, I lack the empathy or the mental connexions to relate to her condition.
It is might be like a Peter-Griffin-says-he-didnt-liked-the-Godfather moment of me
Thinking about it a tad more deeply, the reason might be:
I had the displeasure to live with clinically retarded ex-step-siblings.
It was extremely annoying, it drained my energies when I needed it the most + might drained my empathy for mentally challenged kids for at least 2 decades
Great portrail of mentally disabled kids in common life tho
btw why your profile says banned?
Mii-chan can't pick and choose her circumstances or who's going to be her parent.
You wouldn't blame a kid who's sexually assaulted by their parent, right? Mii-chan is the victim of her parent and grandma.
I don't know that reference, sorry.
Ah, I see.
I'm surprised you're reading this manga, tbh. If you said it was mentally draining you and you can't detached your experience from the story, especially.
IDK, I got banned for 24 hours once.
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I didn't want to go into this too much, not least because I'm not Japanese; I've never been to Japan, never mind lived there, and I mean, I'm a Brit, so the government here is currently planning to save money by hammering benefits for the disabled and telling scores of them "You look okay to get back to work to me!", so I don't think I'm really in any position to be pointing fingers.
That being said, it's really easy to fire up your search engine of choice and ask it about "Japanese attitudes to disability" and see in about five minutes that yeah, it was a very, very contentious issue in the late 1990s and those attitudes still persisted decades later. Among other links, there's a lengthy BBC interview around the Tokyo paralympics where one paralympian specifically says when he came to Japan around 2000 he saw virtually zero signs of people with disabilities or that Japan was doing much of anything to take them into account, and Japanese disability campaigners agreeing with him. (And all of them saying stuff has changed, but there's still more that could be done.)
There's a bunch of websites saying that yes, social stigma around having a disability was great enough that for decades people would rather act like/pretend they literally didn't exist - not simply "Walk past them in the street" - than face the "shame" of admitting it. The assumption for many for a long time was that any kid with a disability just... wouldn't get a regular education full stop. And if you can take potentially distressing content, go look up the 2016 Sagamihara Massacre [edit: fixed spelling] and note that the police decided not to reveal the victims' names and/or faces (i.e. which would have been the usual way of doing things) because their families were worried about discrimination. That was less than ten years ago, and after this manga's timeline in the "present".
So yeah, I absolutely did not want to translate this out of any "Japan bad" sentiment - I only picked it up in the first place because I thought "Oh, hey, something that doesn't glamorise host/hostess clubs, more of this, please", because I was tired of seeing that in Yakuza/Like a Dragon games - and I don't want to tell people they shouldn't be feeling mad about this stuff, or that they shouldn't stop reading it if it feels like too much. Please do, seriously! I didn't want to try translating this to torture people, either, and I'm pretty sure the mangaka thinks the things she's talking about are and/or were terrible and that they're probably upsetting to many. At the same time, trust me, everything I've ever read on the subject suggests that misery-porn it is not.
tl;dr - by all means get mad that these things happened and/or drop the story if you feel so inclined, I'm not the boss of you and I'm absolutely not telling you your feelings are "wrong", just... recognise this was and/or still is way more complicated than simply "One evil character in a story was evil and did some evil stuff and I hate them", I guess?
Hope that makes some kind of sense.
That being said, it's really easy to fire up your search engine of choice and ask it about "Japanese attitudes to disability" and see in about five minutes that yeah, it was a very, very contentious issue in the late 1990s and those attitudes still persisted decades later. Among other links, there's a lengthy BBC interview around the Tokyo paralympics where one paralympian specifically says when he came to Japan around 2000 he saw virtually zero signs of people with disabilities or that Japan was doing much of anything to take them into account, and Japanese disability campaigners agreeing with him. (And all of them saying stuff has changed, but there's still more that could be done.)
There's a bunch of websites saying that yes, social stigma around having a disability was great enough that for decades people would rather act like/pretend they literally didn't exist - not simply "Walk past them in the street" - than face the "shame" of admitting it. The assumption for many for a long time was that any kid with a disability just... wouldn't get a regular education full stop. And if you can take potentially distressing content, go look up the 2016 Sagamihara Massacre [edit: fixed spelling] and note that the police decided not to reveal the victims' names and/or faces (i.e. which would have been the usual way of doing things) because their families were worried about discrimination. That was less than ten years ago, and after this manga's timeline in the "present".
So yeah, I absolutely did not want to translate this out of any "Japan bad" sentiment - I only picked it up in the first place because I thought "Oh, hey, something that doesn't glamorise host/hostess clubs, more of this, please", because I was tired of seeing that in Yakuza/Like a Dragon games - and I don't want to tell people they shouldn't be feeling mad about this stuff, or that they shouldn't stop reading it if it feels like too much. Please do, seriously! I didn't want to try translating this to torture people, either, and I'm pretty sure the mangaka thinks the things she's talking about are and/or were terrible and that they're probably upsetting to many. At the same time, trust me, everything I've ever read on the subject suggests that misery-porn it is not.
tl;dr - by all means get mad that these things happened and/or drop the story if you feel so inclined, I'm not the boss of you and I'm absolutely not telling you your feelings are "wrong", just... recognise this was and/or still is way more complicated than simply "One evil character in a story was evil and did some evil stuff and I hate them", I guess?
Hope that makes some kind of sense.
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Japanese obsession with facade once again preventing actual change/help to happen
I understand not sympathizing with the family since they're vile imbeciles, but how is Mii-chan at fault for what her parents did to bring her into the world?
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Suzaki-sensei actually tried to help. I feel sorry for how helpless and defeated it must have made her feel to be rejected that badly and to know that all that her effort led to was the child hating her and being (illegally) pulled out of school. I wonder if she ever tried that hard again.
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Oh man, the only person who actually cared or wanted to do something to help and she was brutally rejected.
You even gave respect to the source material instead of censoring the message that was conveyed in the original language, despite whether that may be seen as problematic. Keep up the good work.
Japan is a terrible place with a wonderful face. Then again, what place isn't to the disconnected observer...
You are doing such a good job at this, honestly your work is higher quality than even some official translations of things I've seen despite it being MTL.
You even gave respect to the source material instead of censoring the message that was conveyed in the original language, despite whether that may be seen as problematic. Keep up the good work.
Japan is a terrible place with a wonderful face. Then again, what place isn't to the disconnected observer...
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Do bear in mind that from what I've read, even the 1990s was a wild improvement over how it used to be. One of the things I found very quickly was a paper on "Perception of mental illness and disability in Japanese society" (from the University of Iceland in 2020) where according to their citations, up until the 1950s or so (!) if you were a poor household who had a family member who was disabled to the point you found it difficult to look after them, it was legal - even arguably accepted/encouraged - to just... chain them up in a separate room that was all too often effectively a cage where they'd sit in their own filth all day.
The paper argues that this stemmed from animist beliefs about how once evil spirits started making somebody act "funny" like this, why, there was pretty much nothing you could do, and you just had to lock them up out of the way so they didn't pose a threat to the safety of the collective (the village or neighbourhood or whatever). This is supposedly the kind of thing that... mutated? into attitudes like Mii's grandmother, over time, the idea that people like this weren't just The Other, they were so different they were scary, and a sign something was deeply wrong. And that not only did "you" believe this, you knew (or you assumed) everybody else believed this too.
None of which is to remotely excuse these ideas and superstitions sticking around, obviously, or to argue Japan doesn't still have a problem with this stuff. But it has changed, over time. Some of the families who had relatives killed in the Sagamihara Massacre did actually change their minds about keeping quiet and came forward to say no, such-and-such a person who died was my son, daughter, whatever, they existed, we did care about them, and they publicly stated on news programmes "We're doing this because we thought to act like it's shameful the way everyone usually does would be wrong".
I feel fairly sure the mangaka would agree things still aren't great, and I'm assuming she wouldn't want readers to go "Oh, I guess this character or that character can't be blamed really". At the same time I don't think she'd want the takeaway to be "Life for disabled people in Japan is/was A LIVING HELL" or whatever. We've seen Muu-chan find happiness, of a sort, and we can see some people in 2012 - other than Yamada - are willing to treat Mii-chan like a person sometimes (...when it suits them), when they're much less likely to in the 1990s. (Chapter 12 makes that even clearer.)
I feel like it's more a story about how unlike Muu-chan, nobody ever stepped forward to clearly and unmistakeably say to Mii "Do you want help" - there's various reasons nobody does this, obviously (they're bigoted, they want to take advantage of her) but even the "good guys" arguably have the preconception she wouldn't be smart enough to take it. Even Suzaki fumbles this, really, with her "Oh crap this is too complicated", even if you can't blame her for not realising Mii-chan's mother had already primed her to see that as a sign of rejection. (And she is still trying in Chapter 12, too.)
Anyway, I'll, uh, stop typing essays, I guess. <_< Just wanted to get that off my chest. Again, I really didn't want to do this and have anyone thinking it's a "Japan = intrinsically bad" story, so I feel like I ought to go the extra mile to make that clear.
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It's obvious this is a topic you care about, or at the very least find interesting.
I think discussions such as these are constructive and quite rare in the in the anime/manga/media space in general. Your "essays" are the informative fruits of your research and serve well as conversation pieces. That being said:
I have to wonder if the mangaka intended to create characters with a certain human-like complexity or if these characters' actions are also based on the actions of real people. Or rather, how close does this follow the real life of the real Mii-chan? I would love to speak candidly with them beyond the interviews to ask how much of this really happened.
