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Japanese Players' Names

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Japanese Players' Names
I just received an excellent book that compiles the best relief pitchers up to 2000. It's published by BBM so it's all in Japanese.

Now, I can read Chinese w/o any problems, so I can handle most of the most common kanji in Japanese. I can also read hiragana and katakana. The problem with this excellent book is that all the players' names do not have pronunciation help (hiragana) with them, so other than a few famous names, I have no idea how to pronounce the names of these players.

Is there a site online or a textual source that has the names in kanji and hiragana?

Thanks in advance!

Nicolas
Comments
Re: Japanese Players' Names
[ Author: westbaystars | Posted: May 27, 2004 9:06 AM | YBS Fan ]

This is an easy enough request. I open up my database, and with a simple query, all 810 players I have listed for 2000 are saved to this text file (in EUC-JP encoding). [I tried to post the list, but it got cut off at the 'M's.]

If you want to see the player's profile page of a particular player, cut and past the below URL, adding his PlayerID to the end (after the '=' sign):
    http://www.japanesebaseball.com/players/player.jsp?PlayerID=

Note: My database for 2000 is missing a few players. I'm only confident that it's complete from 2002 on.

Re: Japanese Players' Names
[ Author: slingshot | Posted: May 27, 2004 10:28 AM | SFT Fan ]

Thanks for the quick reply westbaystar-san! The file worked without any problems.

If it's not a lot of trouble, would it be possible for you to post a similar file for your player databases from other seasons? Also, do you know of any source that lists similar info (kana for names) for players from older seasons (96 or before)? All the stats and box scores I consult are almost all from Japanese sources, and it would be great if I could start learning how to pronounce the names.

Thanks again for making the file available!

Nicolas
Re: Japanese Players' Names
[ Author: westbaystars | Posted: May 27, 2004 11:29 AM | YBS Fan ]

Here's all that I've got [Link] as of May 27, 2004. Most players since 1996 are included as well as all managers since 1950. The file is a tab-delimited file that can be used in any spreadsheet or imported to any database (although you may need to change the character encoding from EUC-JP to UTF-8 or Shift_JIS). I avoid proprietary file formats like the plague. Alternatively to using a spreadsheet, you can just search the file in a text editor or even with your web browser if you like (which is perhaps the easiest for looking up names).

I've included the Birthdays field to help narrow down time periods for some of the players.

Note: Some of the Kanji are baketeiru (broken). This happened when I ported the database from Access to MySQL many years ago and never got around to fixing them. It's on my list of things to do. If you need any in particular, please include the PlayerID with a request for the fix.

Also, I didn't bother entering the Japanese names at least one year. Again, ask and I'll fix any you need in particular.

P.S. Anyone is free to send me a fixed version of the file and I'll back-port the fixes to my database. Any such help would be greatly appriciated. (Please keep the file in the same order and format for easy comparison.)
Re: Japanese Players' Names
[ Author: Guest | Posted: May 29, 2004 1:02 AM ]

Thanks for the file westbaystar-san! I really appreciate it. It'll take a while for me to go thru it, but I'll do that slowly during my non-dissertating hours. Hopefully when I get the new Baseball Encyclopedia I would be able to speed things up.

Thanks again!

Nicolas
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