Japanese Sign Language

I remember during the summer of 1989 during Deaf Way at Gallaudet University when I was staying in a dormitory I met a young Japanese man whose name I have long forgotten. Like all other foreigners who came to Deaf Way communicated mostly by means of gesturing. Between me and the young Japanese guy we gestured some, showed each other pictures and then he gave me his business card (how typical!) with his home address in Japan. But I have not bothered to contact him all this time nor do I have his business card. Though I do have a picture of him somewhere in my house. And because of that I Googled up some Japanese Sign Language videos to check on a few things first.

Here are two interesting videos of a Japanese woman signing in Japanese Sign Language (JSL).



Did you get it? Any of you? Did you understand what she was saying? Speaking and/or the signing part? I seriously doubt any of you did at least not context-wise on what she was saying aside from recognizing one or two signs like 'writing" and "cold". I'm sure she had something important to say to her viewers out there but since there were no subtitles in this one you wouldn't know, right? Felt a bit left out and wished you could understand her? Yeah, kind of like the people who watch vlogs in ASL wouldn't know either. Not knowing if ASL vloggers had something important to say or discuss, or maybe just a bunch of juvenile gibberish and hand waving.

The next video below is subtitled in both English and Japanese. But since most of you readers in here wouldn't know what she was saying and I'd say that the English subtitle along with JSL is a godsend rather than seen as "distracting." At least with the English subtitle you could gather what each of the Japanese signs may mean.

Arrigato!



Now, with subtitles people from other countries can learn sign language from other each other. Without subtitles embedded with sign language videos, how can people learn another language? Since vlogs from the United States are one of the most watched vlogs over the internet because English is an internationally used language, spoken or in print. Another reason to include subtitles in vlogs just like putting them in helps the Deaf-Blind people understand vlogs in ASL.