Kuroko’s Basketball – 51

Hey, hey, heeeeeeeeeeeeey, folks. Time is in an awkward place right now. How’s everyone been doing? It’s been more than a minute since I last posted, and I know there’s a lot on my plate that people are waiting for. I won’t bother getting into the nitty-gritty details of my life and all of that, so don’t worry. Needless to say, a lot of things came up and I’ve been pretty busy for the last 6 months or so.

Anyway, here’s the first episode of Kuroko’s Basketball Season 3, Episode 51, on Blu-Ray, as promised. This episode gives you a quick recap for the first half of the episode or so, so if you feel like you want a bit of a refresher before diving into Season 3, don’t worry, this episode will bring you up to speed.

So, enjoy the Kuroko, I’ll most likely be back in the next day or so with the next bloopers volume from Season 2, which is Volume 7 in case you’ve lost track.

Oh, and lastly, I need a new qc’er for Season 3 of Kuroko. I need them to be able to watch the 1080p version. If you are interested, please either fill out a form from our site, or message me, Seiyou_AMS, on the Rizon IRC network. Let me know who you are (ie. what your background is), what your experience is (if you have any), and what your availability is like, and we can go from there. Can’t wait to hear from you!

I’m gonna post the links to the episode here now, and then go over the “Izuki/Iduki” thing after the links, since it’s going to be a pretty long explanation (TL;DR at the bottom).

[Saizen]_Kuroko's_Basketball_-_51_[720p][Blu-Ray][E7DCB6FD].mkv
MD5: 03c8af1cb5cf7d08068ebc73c5bc32e8

[Saizen]_Kuroko's_Basketball_-_51_[1080p][Blu-Ray][066096F9].mkv
MD5: 84eab43b3ff4f099a5df46f6f9e4349f

Iduki, Not Audrey Hepburn, and Common Romanization Errors

All righty, then. Let’s do this!

This all has to do with the character who loves nothing more than lame puns, the lovable Izuki Shun (伊月 俊). He’s Seirin’s Point Guard.

So, for the first two seasons of Kuroko’s Basketball, all the available subtitles online correctly romanized 伊月 俊 as “Izuki Shun.” All of that changed in Season 3 when the creators of Kuroko made a really silly error and romanized his name as “Iduki Shun” in all types of “Official” material, like this.

But what’s that you say? The screenshot I posted for the first episode of Season 3 has it as “Izuki.” Yeah, that’s my doing. I typeset “Iduki” out intentionally. As I said before, and I’ll say again here, we will be going with “Izuki” as the correct spelling for his name in Season 3 and anything in the video that contradicts that is going to get written over with the correction.

So why is “Iduki” wrong? The creators know better than us and can name their characters anything they want, you say? While that may be true. They didn’t give good ol’ Izuki an English name. They gave him a Japanese name. A traditional Japanese one, which I already listed, 「伊月 俊」, and there’s a standard for romanizing Japanese names.

Since the “Shun” part is identical, let’s get rid of that and just focus on the “Izuki” part for the rest of this. 「伊月」 is the kanji for Izuki’s name. In hiragana, that’s 「いづき」. So that’s how his name is spelt and where our problem begins. 「いづき」 needs to get transliterated into English, otherwise known as “romanized.” Luckily, we have a pretty good system that exists to do exactly this. It’s called the “Hepburn romanization system.” Under this system, 「いづき」 is broken down into 「い」 being “I,” 「づ」 being “zu,” and 「き」 being “ki.” Putting that all together we get what we’ve been calling him for 2 seasons now, “Izuki.”

If that’s the case and it’s that cut and dry, how come the creators romanized it as “Iduki,” you ask? Well, the reason is really rather simple. There are two other systems that exist for romanization, Kunrei-shiki rōmaji and Nihon-shiki or Nippon-shiki Rōmaji. You can read up on their history if you’d like. That’s totally up to you. The TL;DR is that they are both systems that were made by Japanese people solely for the intention of Japanese-language users as opposed to English-language users. The big difference between these two systems and the Hepburn system is that they prioritize esoteric Japanese grammar over the ability for an English speaker to more accurately pronounce the word.

We get our “du” as opposed “zu” romanization from Nihon-shiki, which is pretty funny, because it is the system that is no longer used in any official capacity (ie. In newspapers, government, etc.). So how did the creators manage to write “du” instead of “zu” if it’s the least used system that is no longer used in any official capacity? Well, this system does have one really big advantage. All the kana characters are romanized differently. You see, in the Hepburn system, there are two different kanas that are romanized as “zu.” Those would be, 「ず」 and 「づ」. The error the creators made comes from the problem this creates. How do you input into an English keyboard 「ず」 or 「づ」 if they are both written as “zu”? The answer is simple. Use the Nihon-shiki system, write “du,” and you’ll get 「づ」. That’s how they made their mistake. They didn’t realize that the way to actually romanize the name was different from how they would write the name on an English keyboard.

TL;DR: “Iduki” is stupid. It’s all our fancy computers’ fault!