Interpreting a tough job on either side of the Pacific

TOKYO — I read with interest stories about the firing — excuse me “dismissal” to be more precise — of the interpreter Toy Matsushita, the translator for Seiya Suzuki of the Chicago Cubs. It was the second such move involving a Japanese interpreter this year, the first being, of course, the “dismissal” of Ippei Mizuhara, the former interpreter for Shohei Ohtani, over a gambling scandal and Mizuhara’s misuse of Ohtani’s bank accounts to pay his gambling debts.

Cubs executives explained their move as “an organizational decision to go in a different direction,” a typically euphemistic corporate way of saying the person being axed was not doing the job.