November 01, 2010 01:04 AM UTC

Crowdsourceable: Do You Know Your Kanji from Katakana?

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• by: Colorado Pols

What follows is a letter that appeared recently in the HD-23 race, between incumbent Max Tyler and Republican challenger Edgar Johansson. Naturally, like all such unsourced mailings filling up mailboxes all over the state, we can’t vouch for any particular claim it makes. What’s interesting about this one is it appears to be from somebody in Japan who knows Johansson from before his stint as a trade representative under Gov. Bill Owens–and half the letter is in Japanese. This is easily one of the weirdest pieces of campaign material we’ve seen in a long time.

We’ve been able to confirm that the Japanese portion of this letter roughly follows the (not so great) English translation that appears above, but it’s apparently written in a formal style that, frankly, nobody we know knows Japanese well enough to decipher. So perhaps one of our astute readers can, and maybe shed some light on the nature of the author’s problem with Johannson:

Yes, folks, it’s still a blog about Colorado politics. We think that makes it even more interesting.