Michael Gurner has thirty years’ experience as a Japanese translator and interpreter.
Michael’s interest in Japan started when he first visited Japan as a high school exchange student. He attended a local public school in Saga Prefecture, Kyūshū—the third largest island of Japan. He was fascinated by the seemingly impenetrable world hidden behind ancient and contemporary Japanese writing, and so he set out to master the Japanese language. He studied Japanese at the University of Adelaide and subsequently lived and worked in Japan numerous times totalling fourteen years.
It was while he was undergoing his own transformative learning experience with memory techniques in 2020 that he went in search of Japanese literature on the subject and fouMichael Gurner has thirty years’ experience as a Japanese translator and interpreter.
Michael’s interest in Japan started when he first visited Japan as a high school exchange student. He attended a local public school in Saga Prefecture, Kyūshū—the third largest island of Japan. He was fascinated by the seemingly impenetrable world hidden behind ancient and contemporary Japanese writing, and so he set out to master the Japanese language. He studied Japanese at the University of Adelaide and subsequently lived and worked in Japan numerous times totalling fourteen years.
It was while he was undergoing his own transformative learning experience with memory techniques in 2020 that he went in search of Japanese literature on the subject and found mono oboe no hiden [Secret Memory Techniques] buried deep in the digital archives of the National Institute of Japanese Literature. The translation process that Michael undertook over a twelve-month period involved creating modern Japanese text equivalents of the original text, and then translating it into modern English. Translation software was not used.
Later, he subsequently found all of the relevant pages of mono oboe no hiden kōhen [Secret Memory Techniques—Book 2] buried even deeper in a larger collection of Edo period literature later published in 1915 called zatsugei sōsho dai ni in the National Diet Library Digital Collections. The translation process that Michael undertook involved creating modern Japanese text equivalents of the 1915 version—written in the same classical Japanese as the original done in 1772—and then translating it into modern English. Translation software was not used.
While translation is no longer his day job, Michael was nonetheless excited by the challenge of deciphering the 250-year-old books to reveal their secrets and share the discoveries with others to enjoy....more