山梨県のひみつ

Not an actual book review, but just a reactionary letter sent to the publishers of a book that especially annoyed me:

Again, my apologies for writing in English. My Japanese writing is poor, notwithstanding having read over 100 of your ひみつ books.

I just finished 山梨県のひみつ and I feel I have to say something. More so since I actually lived in Yamanashi many years ago.

The smallest problem is one that I've called to your attention before: Unreadable fonts. This is most often a problem with the まめちしき, especially the フリガナ where the little 〃 and ゜ can be hard to tell apart. However, this book had MANY pages of small print that made the problem much worse. I actually wound up running those pages through a high resolution scanner and displaying them full-screen on my 28-cm monitor, and even then they were barely readable in places.

That leads to the middling problem, which was the book took MUCH more effort than any previous volume of ANY of your series, which I've been reading for many years. In general, the ひみつ books are a pleasure to read, but this one was NOT. If you don't believe me (or if you don't care), then I strongly urge you to ask ANY of the children (your intended audience) who have actually read this volume.

Sometimes less is more, and in this volume there was LOTS of stuff that could have been cut, which also would have allowed you to use larger fonts for the remaining material while making the book more pleasant to read. For example, all of the America stuff was unimportant and distracting and should have been cut. The details hours and fees of the museums are not needed here, but if you insist, all of that stuff could have been reduced to a one-page table at the end of the book. Lots of unneeded redundancy, especially around the high-speed train.

Lastly, the big problem: I felt personally offended by the use of katakana for the Japanese words of the two American children. Hard to read and it feels downright racist, too. Perhaps the biggest difference between America and Japan is that Americans think that anyone can learn to speak English, while the Japanese think no one can learn to speak Japanese unless they are born Japanese.