Oldsmobile, Toyota, T2, it's all about Vista
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I've read many comments about Windows Vista after Microsoft announced it (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/). Some were positive and some not so positive and that made me wonder how Japanese customers would like the new name. Does it sound cool to them or not? Japan is the second largest market and they are always interested in new OS releases.
As a Japanese native the first two things that came into my mind when I saw the announcement were "Toyota" and "T2". Toyota is the Toyota Motor Corporation (http://www.toyota.com/) and T2 is the movie "Terminator 2".
Just like "Vista Cruiser" of Oldsmobile many Japanese people recalled "Toyota Vista" in their mind. I saw many people wrote about Toyota Vista and T2 in their blogs and web page. (Toyota Vista was a name of car model and the name was also used for their dealership network.) According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Vista Toyota stopped production of Vista in 2003 and changed the brand name of dealership too. We used to see "Toyota Vista" signs everywhere in Japan but now they are gone.
"Hasta la Vista, Baby" might be one of the most famous Spanish phrases known in Japan, I guess. When the movie first came out thought it was a cool movie and I really liked the ending. The problem was most Japanese people don’t speak Spanish language so it was hard to guess what he said. It didn't sound like English, that's what I thought. So we just believed the Japanese subtitle for the words which said "See you in hell". In the movie it did make perfect sense, though many of my friends and I believed that "Hasta la Vista" means "see you in hell" for quite a long time. I think something was completely lost in translation and the translator added another flavor in Japanese subtitles.
Another new name from Microsoft is a font name called "Meiryo". Windows Vista is going to offer new ClearType font to support JIS X 0213:2004 (Japanese Industrial Standards for Kanji characters). "Meiryo" means "clear" in Japanese. I didn't find any official story about the origin of the new font name. By adopting JIS X0213:2004, Windows Vista with the new Meiryo font will give us a good solution for the inconsistency issue between printer fonts and display fonts we currently have. There will be a compatibility issue between older versions of Windows and Windows Vista, but this is the right direction for the Japanese Kanji world.
