Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
5-4, Shibaura 4-chome,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0023
I agree with David Chester’s observations in “Nothing funny about death,” (August 24, 2008). I think he has hit the nail right on the head questioning the propriety of some of the captions accompanying some photographs in the newspaper, as well as some of the photographs themselves. It is not at all a rare occurrence for the Japan Times to print a photograph or letter-to-the-editor with a questionable caption or title that falls somewhere in the scale of stale-to-stupid. You would think that the newspaper employs native English staff to catch faux pas and check idioms, but it appears not to because not a week goes by that there is not some caption that falls flat - written by a Japanese speaker trying to be witty in English and failing at it.