Who is Hiroo Yamagata?

A Japanese critic, translator and development consultant, known as the translator of works such as Piketty's *Capital in the Twenty-First Century*. Yamagata translated the Japanese edition of the book *Plurality* (*PLURALITY*, Cybozu Shiki Books, 2025), and the translation went forward alongside an online gathering of readers.

Pick up the Japanese edition of Plurality and the translator's name is on the cover: someone who has brought a great many books into Japanese, from major works of economics to science fiction.

In short

Hiroo Yamagata (山形浩生) is a critic and translator, and also a development consultant. Yamagata is known as the translator of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century [1].

Yamagata translated the Japanese edition of Plurality, PLURALITY 対立を創造に変える、協働テクノロジーと民主主義の未来 (PLURALITY: turning conflict into creation, collaborative technology and the future of democracy; Cybozu Shiki Books, released May 2, 2025) [1].

Connection to Plurality

Translator of the Japanese edition. The authors of the Japanese edition are Audrey Tang, E. Glen Weyl and the ⿻ Community; the translation is by Hiroo Yamagata, and the commentary by Ken Suzuki. It is A5 size, 624 pages, priced at 3,000 yen (before tax), and specially includes a foreword for the Japanese edition by Tang and Weyl [1]. According to the publisher's page, the translation was made from the English original and its Taiwanese edition [2]. → Editions and translations of the book

A translation made alongside a gathering of readers. Making the Japanese edition was a translation project led by Hirokazu Nishio. Nishio published a machine-translated draft, and the translation of the book was done by Yamagata [3].

The Japanese team first created a space for discussion on Scrapbox (now Cosense, a web notebook that everyone can write in). Nishio writes that the aim was not the actual work of translation, but to make communication possible around the manuscript [4].

Marks of contribution for the translator. In April 2024, a proposal was made on the side of the English edition to give tokens (credits used in governance) to those who translated the book. In response, Nishio wrote in a memo that high-quality translation is hard to achieve by distributed volunteer work, and that the plan was to ask an experienced, knowledgeable translator to do most of it. Nishio then proposed that, since producing the final manuscript that goes into the book is very heavy work, 80 to 90 percent of the points earned from translation should go to Yamagata. On top of that, where Yamagata found a contribution helpful, Yamagata would pass on credits as a gift, and the remaining 10 percent would be distributed by Nishio, who would look up who had joined the discussion of each chapter [4]. → ⿻ credits, Plural Management Protocol

Progress. Nishio's memo of June 17, 2024 records that Yamagata was translating and had finished up to chapter 6, and that the book was due out from Cybozu Shiki Books within the year [5]. In July 2024 a pre-order page appeared on an online store, with a planned release date of December 31, 2024 (as recorded on a third party's blog) [6]. The actual release was May 2, 2025 [1].

Publishing the translation. The manuscript and figures of the Japanese edition are released under CC0 (no rights reserved) in the official Japanese translation repository (nishio/plurality-japanese) [7].

Yamagata's translations inside the book. Footnotes in the Japanese edition add, for works the book cites, such as J. C. R. Licklider's paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis", the Japanese translations that Yamagata had already made and published on Yamagata's blog and elsewhere [8][9]. → The Lost Dao

Main ideas

The materials for this article include no source in which Yamagata sets out views on the content of Plurality (a translator's afterword, an interview or a blog post). The translator's afterword appears only in the printed book. So this article does not describe Yamagata's view of Plurality.

The publisher's introduction gives this background [1].

Born in Tokyo in 1964
Completed a master's program in urban engineering at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Engineering, and a master's program at the Center for Real Estate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Critic, translator and development consultant
Books include 翻訳者の全技術 (All the techniques of a translator), 新教養主義宣言 (A new liberal arts manifesto), 要するに (In short) and 経済のトリセツ (A user's manual for the economy)
Translations include Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Krugman's introduction to economics (クルーグマン教授の経済入門), and Norberg's Progress and OPEN

Sources

PR TIMES, announcement of the Japanese edition of PLURALITY (2025-05-02, in Japanese) — https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000017.000101800.html
Cybozu Shiki Books, PLURALITY Japanese translation (in Japanese) — https://cybozushiki.cybozu.co.jp/books/plurality/
Hirokazu Nishio, "デジタル民主主義の川の流れを見る" (Code for Japan Summit 2025, 2025-11-29, in Japanese) — https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17tgJ8fYFwqrICRxSNpkCM4k_OWR5p1DBGJXiZAdSwy0/
"翻訳者のためのトークン配布プランV2" (plurality-japanese, 2024-04-08, in Japanese) — https://scrapbox.io/plurality-japanese/%E7%BF%BB%E8%A8%B3%E8%80%85%E3%81%AE%E3%81%9F%E3%82%81%E3%81%AE%E3%83%88%E3%83%BC%E3%82%AF%E3%83%B3%E9%85%8D%E5%B8%83%E3%83%97%E3%83%A9%E3%83%B3V2
Hirokazu Nishio, "ブロードリスニング、TTTC、デジタル民主主義、Pluralityの関係" (How broad listening, TTTC, digital democracy and Plurality relate) (2024-06-17, in Japanese) — https://scrapbox.io/nishio/%E3%83%96%E3%83%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%83%AA%E3%82%B9%E3%83%8B%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B0%E3%80%81TTTC%E3%80%81%E3%83%87%E3%82%B8%E3%82%BF%E3%83%AB%E6%B0%91%E4%B8%BB%E4%B8%BB%E7%BE%A9%E3%80%81Plurality%E3%81%AE%E9%96%A2%E4%BF%82
"今年末にオードリー・タンとグレン・ワイルらの『Plurality』の邦訳が出るとな" (So a Japanese translation of Plurality by Audrey Tang, Glen Weyl and others is coming out at the end of this year) (YAMDAS現更新履歴, 2024-07-24, in Japanese) — https://yamdas.hatenablog.com/entry/20240724/plurality-japanese
ReadMe of plurality-japanese — https://github.com/nishio/plurality-japanese ［CC0］
PLURALITY, Japanese edition, footnotes to 3-3 "失われた道" (The Lost Dao) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/jpn/ ［CC0］
PLURALITY, Japanese edition, footnotes to 4-2 "団体と⿻公衆" (Association and ⿻ Publics) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-2/jpn/ ［CC0］

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Who is Hiroo Yamagata?

In short

Connection to Plurality

Main ideas

Further reading

Sources