Field Day

After the untimely… extended vacation of your uncle, who was a Japanese arcade game fanatic, you are left to go through his basement of 1980s wonders. It’s during your perusal that you find an arcade game that catches your eye… it’s THE運動会 : a pixelated sports game, which is perfect considering you have no physical abilities whatsoever in real life. The only problem is that you don’t speak or read Japanese. So, you’ve now been forced to resort to one of the wonders of the ancient world: the user manual. On one of the final pages of the manual, you find a blurb in English 

For English Translation: 

Enter the code on the configuration page for each page you would like to translate. For example: 

“What an odd way to encode that,” you think. Nevertheless, you check the configuration page, and everything looks fine. You start the game, but 10 minutes later, you find that your uncle translated all the pages except the last one! You whip out your favourite Japanese resource (*jisho.org*), open a Word document to record some characters, and do some other Googling. You stand tall and have an idea that’s a *stroke* of genius… perhaps there’s some *uni*fying *character*istics between the examples? 

5

Hint #1: Some parts of the description have been changed to be more clear

Hint #2:  The object of this puzzle is to figure out the code. Consistent with the rest of Mega Puzzle, this code will use only English letters (no numbers, no special/foreign characters). Consider the two examples given: 

運動会 -> [Changes] -> HuSixMeeting 

障害物競争 -> [Changes] -> WiiYuContend 

Hint #3: It looks like we’ll need to work with表彰式. First, we’ll need to determine the pattern/changes done on the examples. Then, using the same logic as our examples we'll figure out the code.

Hint #4: Have you considered these A+ resources? They may be worth a glance… or a thorough reading! 

1. https://jisho.org/#radical

2. https://www.branah.com/unicode-converter  

3. https://en.wiktionary.org/  

Hint #5: Think linearly: we give the flavour text, emphasised text, and resources in a particular order. Trust us: resources are here to help you; you can solve the puzzle using other sites, but we give you these specific sites because we like them

Hint #6: It seems that the codes don’t come from merely translating… we may have to do multiple steps to get to the right code. The examples should help with determining these steps. 

Hint #7: Japanese never uses spaces… maybe we should disregard spaces, too? 

Hint #8: Every Japanese Kanji (also known as a Han character or Chinese character) has an individual meaning that helps builds the meaning of a word or phrase! When considering a phrase as a non-native speaker, it’s helpful to consider both the meaning of the phrase and the meaning of the individual Kanji in the phrase. 

Hint #9: A distinctive quality of Kanji is their organisation by the number of strokes that are required to write the character. For example, jisho.org tells us that the Kanji 桜 has 10 strokes. (Note that for some long phrases, Jisho separates results into the noun parts, so you may need to click between the nouns at the top of the results page.) 

Hint #10: Did you know? Unicode is a common encoding standard across many devices and the internet, especially for Kanji and other non-ASCII characters. Unicode characters are encoded by typing \u followed by four alphanumeric characters when using the UTF-16 standard. For example, \u6850 is 桐. 

Hint #11: Hmm… perhaps we’re not supposed to add the stroke count together… what if we put the stroke counts right after each other like this: 2, 10, 5 -> 2105? 

Hint #12: Still struggling a bit? Wait! You have a glimmer of hope! You realise that the first bit must have to do with pronunciations of some kind of character… now, how do we get there?