Saturday, October 14, 2017

Who is Satoshi Shimura (志村哲: Satosi Simura, aka “Simura Zenpo”)?

Was approached for a music related translation job through the JAT website and decided to proof this old translation, which had included an expedient or two, to send it to the publisher. So here is the proofed version....

I don’t have much time to spend describing this individual, but may supplement later.

 He was introduced to me by Sasaoka Teizan, the Tozan-ryu shakuhachi teacher whom I started studying the shakuhachi with. I was a translator interested in history as well as making shakuhachi, and Shimura (who prefers to spell his name “Simura”) was an adjunct professor who had written on classical shakuhachi and had an X-ray machine at his disposal, and happened to be interested in having some of his work translated. Like Sasaoka Teizan, his wife had died and left him a widower, but I don’t recall any other biographical information about him.
 
He gave me a copy of a book (with accompanying CD: https://www.amazon.co.jp/%E5%8F%A4%E7%AE%A1%E5%B0%BA%E5%85%AB%E3%81%AE%E6%A5%BD%E5%99%A8%E5%AD%A6-%E5%BF%97%E6%9D%91-%E5%93%B2/dp/4882932164/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8) he’d published recently, and I translated a couple of chapters of it for him, the entirety of which I’ve posted below. He subsequently used that in a presentation at the 2004 New York Shakuhachi Festival:

http://www.bigappleshak.com/bas/dailyprogramprint.html
























I gave a copy of that translation to Brian Schultz (aka Brian Uneme), a student of Preston Houser (a defendant in the lawsuit), and tried to help Schultz with his Japanese, etc. I have presented the Court with excerpts of emails with Schultz, but not of the following chat, where he mentions "simura" and "syakuhati".



































We were always on opposite sides of various issues, including his support of the linguistically illegitimate approach to Romanizing Japanese pronunciation. I don’t recall who developed the system, but it is basically aimed at mystifying Japanese, making it phonetically inaccessible through adopting spellings such as “syakuhati” instead of the phonetically more accurate (and readily accessible) ‘shakuhachi’. As I said, there’s a mystification subterfuge to it, and that had always made him somewhat suspect, but he respected my stance as a linguist, so I only spelled his name using that system in the paper.

Someone else that subsequently studied with him at Osaka College of the Arts (suspected CIA et al. operative Kiku Day) did adopt some of his spellings when talking about his work in a paper she published (available here: http://www.kikuday.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Changes-of-construction-of-jinashi-shakuhachi_2.pdf) The last time I saw him was at the shakuhachi festival in Kyoto (CIA organized: he is a suspected Ko-an-sho (公安省) officer), and he Kiku Day was at a presentation he was giving attended by only a handful of people. I didn't know anything about the woman at that point, and she didn't seem very intelligent, but now I understand why he was reticent, and believe that she probably knew who I was.

Shimura’s Facebook page his here:

And these are links to a few relevant photos:


























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