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It goes back further than KS and Niji.

My Japanese is horrible at best, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

Can't "狗" (Inu, or in this case ku) also mean "Counterfeit" or "Inferior"? so couldn't you translate 山狗 as "Pile of Inferiors"?

Just asking...

G3n0c1de wrote:Google translate and wiktionary here.

山狗 'Yamainu'. 山 'Yama' means 'mountain'. 狗 'inu' means 'dog'. 'Mountain dog' eh? Is this a niji reference? More likely its an inside joke, or something that would be relevant only to someone who worked on the project that far back (devs).

We now know where all the cripples come from.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EMVOiltmRY

HeMeido wrote:

G3n0c1de wrote:Google translate and wiktionary here.

山狗 'Yamainu'. 山 'Yama' means 'mountain'. 狗 'inu' means 'dog'. 'Mountain dog' eh? Is this a niji reference? More likely its an inside joke, or something that would be relevant only to someone who worked on the project that far back (devs).

We now know where all the cripples come from.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EMVOiltmRY

On the bright side, we curbed crud at least a little; we could have ended up with a cast called Kion, Tion, Nion, Hion, Rion and Wion.

To explain a little further:

After the first series of Higurashi the Translation Checker (SirNumbSkull) went into a rant about how the last two arcs were much better, and so we set about translating the Minagoroshi and Matsuribayashi chapters.

This is the first time SNS had ever seen the kanji for the Yamainu, and so he did what everyone else does; reach for WWWJDIC. The on reading for that character is "Ku" whilst the Kun reading is "Inu".
Of course, if he were using the on reading it should have been "Sanku", but we ended up with "Yamaku" in a lot of the scripts.
This was going on at about the same time that we were starting KS, and names for the school were being decided upon. I decided to use Yamaku as a bit of a homage to WinD and TheHinamizawaClub, because at that time I was still hard for fansubbing.


There are a number of other very, very oblique references like this in KS. Early on in the peice TcDohl and I had "full" (I use that term lightly) control over the creative side of things, and were tasked with filling in the gaps. Whenever I had to think of a name I just came up with something that was relevant to me (Lol Iwanako).

I might find that story more interesting if I was actually interested in Japanese culture. At least it's nice to know a little bit of the origins behind the school name.

I'm surprised that nobody pointed it out yet, but the first two syllables could be reversed and form "mayaku," which is "drug."

The funny thing about this old thread is that I always thought it was 山区 (Yamaku) or (Mountain Ward), some fictitious district maybe based on Aobayama (Mount Aoba) in Sendai. It made perfect sense to me that a school on Mount Aoba would be called the Yamaku Academy in fiction based around Sendai. Truth is stranger than fiction, indeed.