Maruko’s class prepares to say goodbye to their beloved music teacher Oishi Sensei. Hope you got a kleenex handy, because this one’s a bit of a weepie! NYAA

Maruko learns the story of how her parents met and eventually got together.

This episode was a really fun one to do, since it tends to send up the cliches you see in sappy love dramas. Also, it’s pretty crazy how good-looking Maruko’s parents were when they were younger.

NYAA

Maruko and Tama-chan get sucked into going to a party hosted by Migiwa. But is it really going to be as terrible as they think?

Hope you enjoyed the little seasonal skits with the bunnies that appeared during the end-of-episode preview! They’re gone forever now -- replaced by Maruko on a flying unicycle. Aw well, it’s cute too.

Rather torrent the video instead? Follow the link below!

NYAA

Momoko Sakura (1965 - 2018)

Episode 60

Episode 60 is now available for your torrenting delight.

NYAA

This episode takes us back to the halcyon days when class would actually get called off if there was a particularly vile cold making its way around. Maruko yearns for her class to be called off when she finds out her sister is able to stay home, but as it always is in the world of Chibi Maruko-chan, Maruko’s yearning doesn’t end in very pleasant results.

Translation checking done by Sean W.!

The Future!

Hello, everyone!

In what has been an annoying turn of events for everyone (and believe me, I've seen all of your messages) I've had to make all of the videos on my YouTube channel private. And since YouTube has been my primary method of distribution, this has pretty much crippled MaruChanSubs for the moment. I'm going to lay out some background for what happened and then discuss what steps are going to come next.

Background ----------

One of the things that motivated this subtitling project was noticing the prevalence of Chibi Maruko-chan videos that exist and continue to exist on YouTube. Since I was new to the whole fansubbing thing, I figured this would be the simplest way to distribute the subtitled videos so the largest number of people could watch. Once I started uploading videos to the service, they would immediately get monetized by Nippon Animation, the makers of Chibi Maruko-chan. This by no means meant that I was permitted or authorized by them to do what I was doing, but I figured it sort-of nudged things into a grey area, one where I could happily exist on my own as long as the wrong people didn't find out what I was doing.

Well, things change. I have my suspicions as to why the attitude changed, but I'll spare you folks from them unless you're really desperate to know. What happened first is that the live-action episode I translated last year to celebrate 1000 subscribers was hit by a copyright strike in the middle of June. This had nothing to do with ContentId or any algorithm -- this was a manual takedown request by Fuji Television. That was fair enough, the only monetization on that video was due to Odoru Pompokolin playing in the beginning credits, so nobody who actually made the show was getting a cut. Getting a one-off wiped from the channel wasn't a huge deal, since all it really meant was that I wouldn't have to bother finishing the translation for the 2nd live-action episode. As long as the actual animated episodes themselves weren't causing any grief, things could continue as normal.

Fast forward to a few Wednesdays ago where I'm out visiting with friends when out of the blue I get an email telling me that Episode 57 has been taken down due to a copyright strike. And here's the kicker -- the takedown wasn't issued by Nippon Animation. Instead, it was issued from some inscrutable Japanese broadcasting bureaucracy called A-PAB or the Association for the Promotion of Advanced Broadcasting Services. (I'm imagining they're acting on behalf of some other vested interest who would prefer to remain unnamed, but who can really tell with these things.) That pretty much put a damper on the rest of my evening, as you can imagine. With two copyright strikes on the channel already, the next one meant the shutdown of my channel, and with some group picking off videos randomly it was only a matter of time before the channel crashed and burned. So, I had a choice between leaving everything up and waiting for the axe to fall which would have left a bunch of subscribers with no idea about what happened, or I could wipe out everything and leave some way for my regular viewers to find out where they could go to get more episodes. As you're all aware of by now, I went with the second option.

This has been pretty frustrating for me as well as you -- I know I don't really have a legal leg to stand on as I was distributing copyrighted materials, but the fact remains that there's several intact uploads of Episode 57 to YouTube that have yet to receive takedown notices, so I'm confused as to why I was specifically targeted for it, unless they took down one random video to send a message. Regardless, it is what it is and now it's time to start thinking towards the future.

Future ------

As of this moment, MaruChanSubs is falling in line with literally every other fansub group out there by primarily doing its releases through torrents. After catching up with the batch torrents to get up to Episode 60, every episode thereafter will be released primarily via a torrent. Getting the batch torrents up to 60 will take a bit, so unless I decide to go down a different route in the future, work on new episodes will stop until the batch torrents have caught up.

This doesn't mean I'm entirely abandoning streaming, however. Since the channel is still intact, once the copyright strikes have been removed from the channel I'll begin uploading there again. (Unless the corporate overlords start cracking down on Chibi Maruko-chan on YouTube entirely, of course.) Here's the kicker, though -- I'm only going to store a couple of episodes at a time there. Once a new one comes up, the oldest one has to come down. So in effect, episodes will be rotating. I realize this is far from ideal, but I'm really trying to balance accessibility and the possibility of the hammer falling and crushing everything here. Not everyone has the knowhow or even the ability to access torrents, nor can they easily find the anime streaming sites that aggregate the content of those torrents. In a perfect world I would like to make it so everything was streamable, but them's the breaks.

Thanks a bunch for your patience during this unfortunate hiccup!

Cordially,

The MaruChanSubs Guy

More holiday merriment this week as Maruko and her family get ready to ring in the New Year. There’ll be another New Year’s episode next week, too! Yeah, if you haven’t heard before, the Japanese kinda take the New Year really seriously.

As promised last week, initial translation on this episode was done by Sean W. Everyone give him a hand for doing a great job during his first crack at bat!

Maruko is forced to go to her neighborhood’s community Christmas Party for children, and several sad and pitiful sights are there to behold.

Well hello there! Been a while since I posted the new episode update, but here we are, back again. It’s gonna be a few more weeks of episodes about New Year’s and then hopefully we’re gonna be moving on to stuff that’s more chronologically appropriate for this time of year. Unless you’re reading this post in December, I guess, in which case... Merry Christmas? Happy Holidays? Hope you’re enjoying life, future person!

This week I did the initial translation and Sean W. did the pass-through once again. Episode 52 is going to be Sean’s first crack at the walnut for initial translation, and with him helping with that hopefully that’s going to give me the opportunity to clean some of the other Maruko-related stuff off my plate, namely another batch torrent.

Hello everyone! I’m happy to announce that MaruChanSubs has a new volunteer by the name of Sean W., and he’ll be doing both translation checking and initial translation. Sean, would you care to say a few words?

Ah, I see... Well, then, thank you very much for your assistance, and everyone, please look forward to a higher-quality product from this point on!

Okay, everyone’s recovered from being put through the emotional wringer during the last episode? Good, because we’re back to comfy business as usual this week, with Maruko looking for a better alternative when she gets tired of sharing a room with her sister.

Butaro’s been introduced before, in the swimming pool episode, but I think this is the first time he’s done his trademark ‘buu’ from which his name is derived. He doesn’t start off so bad, but soon enough both him and his family are going to be adding ‘buu’ to the end of every damn sentence. ‘Buu’ is Japanese onomatopoeia for a pig’s oink, so this kid is literally oinking after he says anything. So if you’re wondering why his nose looks like a pig’s, there ya go.

Maruko’s life is on the verge of changing forever in the aftermath of a fight between her parents.

I know a lot of you watch this show as something comfy to relax with after a hard day, so I’m going to warn you this episode is a lot heavier than what you’re used to. This one deals with what it’s like to be a young child faced with the prospect of your family splitting up forever, so if you’d rather not watch a family in turmoil, you might want to think twice before settling in. If you’re able to, however, I strongly advise you to, as I think this is one of the best episodes in the series.

Oh yeah, and that Kobayashi guy she imagines in the sky halfway through the episode? No idea who that’s supposed to represent, whether it’s another famous character named Kobayashi, some celebrity named Kobayashi, or just some guy in Maruko’s life named Kobayashi. There’s not a lot to work with there, so no playing 70s Japan pop culture detective this time! The joke still kind of works, so whatever.

Maruko, Hanawa, and Tama-chan are besieged by chickens when they’re tasked with cleaning the chicken coop. Then, Maruko is overjoyed when she’s given the opportunity to watch over the house on a Sunday when everyone else leaves.

Note that the chicken coop story is based on one of the autobiographical manga chapters, so yes, Momoko Sakura, probably one of the richest women in Japan at this point, did do Maruko’s bizarre tactic of gathering the eggs in real life. Also, the Sensei who pointed out how foolish she was being was far less kind than Maruko’s Sensei, that’s for sure.

This also marks the first point where I didn’t bother translating a pun and just put in a translator’s note. I generally try doing a pun translation if I can get it to work but I couldn’t come up with a way to do it that didn’t sound really labored. Leaving it as is felt like the best option at that point, so there it is. 

Pun translation is always tricky when it comes to making subs in general and there’s no way to make everybody happy, I’ve found. Some people prefer localizations, others prefer to have whatever knowledge they have of the language respected, and because of that you just can’t please everybody. That’s just the Fansub Crap Sandwich, and everybody who tries their hand at fansubbing is going to have to take a big ol’ bite at some point. I had to deal with some of that for my Night is Short, Walk on Girl translation, it’s why I lost enthusiasm for a bit, and it’s also why I’m just going to stick with translating Chibi Maruko-chan for the near future.