Answer: What's that word again? The challenge of cross-cultural search

As is usual with cross-cultural search challenges, this one was very difficult.  But the stalwarts in SRS came through with an answer!  Impressive work, team! 


Our question:  

1.  What's the Japanese term for a publisher taking a writer out of their normal life and secreting them away in a hotel until they've completed writing the book that they're obligated to write?  

And the short answer: 

The practice is referred to as kanzume (say "kahn-zoo-may" for approximation.  It literally means "canning" or its product (as in sardines, beets, and tuna).  A more up-to-date cultural translation may be "vacuum packed."  The collocation is kanzume ni naru  (i.e., to become canned; literally, to reach a point of being put into a can).

Let's look back at the comments to see the thread of how we solved this problem. 

There are a bunch of valiant attempts to search for this concept.  We saw queries like: 

 ["professional writers in japan"]

 ["authors” “japan" " publishing contracts"]

 [authors OR writers "japan" "contract law"]

 ["japanese law publishing contract" author OR writer]

 [blogs japan authors OR writers "how to get published"]


 ["japan" authors OR writers ]

 [ how to publish a book in japan ]

 [ "japanese authors" contract "writer's block" ]

 [ "japanese authors" imprisonment ]


 [ "japanese authors" imprisoned ]

People searched in blogs, in News, and in Books.  

The fundamental problem here is that the searcher is trying to figure out what English words are going to be associated with the Japanese word / words / phrase on a web page.  Ideally, you'd like to find a dictionary, maybe even a reverse dictionary from Japanese to English.  

To make things worse, the challenge is a fairly sophisticated one.  Whenever you see something like this (that involves high culture, social transactions, and something that's apparently slightly transgressive), there's a VERY good chance that the word/words/phrase will be idiomatic or metaphorical.  

For instance, if I was to ask you for a common English phrase for being fired from a job, you might say "he's been canned," right?  Of course, the action of putting into a can is metaphorical.  

And that's the issue we have here.  How does one look for this kind of thing? 

There are really two approaches. 

1.  Try to guess the analogous descriptive phrase.  That's what we see in the above list of queries.  Searchers are trying to guess what the co-located description of the concept is.  

When I did this, I tried about 30 queries (all variations on the ones above) before I found one that worked:  

     [ Japan artist OR author confine hotel ] 

I did this search in Google Books, and was lucky to find a book on the creation of Japanese manga ("Dreamland Japan: Writings on on Modern Manga") in which this memorable quote appears on page 221:  

"If the pages are not ready, the editor must sometimes resort to kanzume ("canning"), corralling the artist and confining him to his hotel room until he finishes the pages."  

For the record, I was able to find other books that mention the word kanzume with just

   [ Japan author confine hotel ]

but it's true--in such difficult cross-cultural cases, you're often searching around for something that mentions the word/words/phrase near by the English words used.  

That's why I went to Books to focus my search.  I was counting on someone writing a sentence like that in English, and then giving the Japanese term.  

Once I had the word kanzume, it's pretty straight-forward to search for something like: 

     [ kanzume hotel publisher ] 

and then find other confirmations, such as in the book Literary Life in Tōkyō, 1885-1915: Tayama Katai's Memoirs 'Thirty Years in Tōkyō' where the author writes in a footnote: 

"Publishers often went to such lengths to ensure that authors (especially important ones) actually did complete contracted work.  The practice still continues, and is known nowadays as ‘canning’ (‘kanzume’…)  Of course, publishers have no legal authority to detain writers.  The writer has to agree to be ‘detained’, and then (nowadays) moves into a hotel near the publishing company, where he shares a room with a ‘supervisor’ appointed by the company.  Few if any writers appear to have protested against the practice, no doubt welcoming the opportunity to get down some intensive writing, the notoriety, and the chance to avoid the possibility of more serious consequences over breach of contract.”  

 2.  Ask a friend (or post to a social media) from that culture.  While the search I describe above works just fine, as we saw from the comments, this is often a difficult path to follow.  Realistically, it's often much faster to post this question to a Japanese friend, or to put it out on a mailing-list or social media that's a provider of good answers.  It's not hard to find online groups that specialize in answering these kinds of questions.  (We'll talk about finding such groups in a future post.)  

And in fact, that's how this whole thing came about in the first place.  To confirm my answer, I contacted a friend who teaches Japanese, and has written textbooks about learning Japanese.   (She also grew up in Japan, but now lives in the midwest.)  

Mari described how the word kanzume works, and gave me a bit of the backstory on the concept.  That kind of first-hand evidence from a person in-and-of the culture is absolutely the best.  

Slight Warning:  If you search for the word kanzume in isolation, you might end up with some slightly risque images on your desktop.  It turns out that Kanzume Goddess is a "deck-building" card game that's done in a manga style.  The lead character is a young woman who wears squarish glasses... and very little else.  And, FWIW, the game itself comes in a can.  

Search lessons:  There are a few lessons here.  

1.  For cross-cultural searches, people from that culture are the experts.  And, given the nature of social media, it's usually pretty easy to find experts inhabiting online discussion boards and lists.  Remember also that many libraries have "cultural experts" who can easily answer questions like this.  Remember too the "Ask a Librarian" feature is still available to you. 

2.  For complex, underdetermined questions that are trans-language, Books are your friend.  Think about what kind of books would have the information you seek (in this case, a side-comment explaining the concept and giving the Japanese language term), and then search inside of them to find the explanatory quote. 

3.  Onen you have the word/words/phrase confirm your finding by looking for other examples and definitions.  After all, you've got the word itself, at least in the English-form.  It's easy to check for its appearance elsewhere. 

In this case, the problem is to find a defining page (such as a Japanese-English dictionary), or a page that discusses the idea (such as a Wikipedia page, although probably in Japanese).  
The easiest way to do this is to search for a definition in an online dictionary.  (As opposed to Google Translate.)  Do a search like this one to find a Japanese-English language dictionary: 

     [ kanzume dictionary definition ] 

there are quite a few low-quality hits, but after going down the SERP a bit, you'll find a few higher quality dictionaries.  The first one I found that was useful was RomanjiDesu.com site, which shows:   

Looking at definition two shows us the sense of the word we're looking for in translation. 

Side comment:  Why didn't I search for something like [ Japanese English dictionary kanzume ] ?  I actually did that first, but found the results weren't as high of quality (too many dictionaries in the SERP that did NOT have the word kanzume in them.  So I took out the [ Japanese English ... ] part of the query to focus more on definitions.  

Now that we know both what the Kanji form of the word should be (缶詰 ) and the Katakana form (かんづめ), it's a small search step to look for a Wikipedia entry for this topic. (I didn't know that one existed before I started, but I thought it was worth a try.  Sure enough, the query: 

     [ 缶詰 Wikipedia ] 

gives us a link to the Wikipedia entry in Japanese.  

In this case, it's clear that the first hit (even if you don't read Kanji) is the correct one.  

Using Google Translate's rough-and-ready Japanese-to-English translation service we see that (this fragment is near the bottom of the page): 

And with this method, I'm convinced that we have a good result for the challenge.  
Search on, multiculturally! 


[[ Kudos to Enusan for being the first and to BreadmanTalking  for being the second to solve the challenge.  Nice use of your cultural resources!  ]]