Diet Slims Down

[Mulboyne]

Yomiuri: Shorthand being phased out at Diet
Shorthand used by stenographers at House of Councillors sessions is being largely replaced by a new method of typing text into computers starting from the 2009 ordinary Diet session, which convened Monday. The new system will be used to record minutes of the upper house's question-and-answer sessions, except for in plenary sessions and meetings of three upper house committees...In July 2005, the upper house decided to stop employing a new stenographer from fiscal 2006 as part of workforce cutbacks. The chamber also decided to gradually abolish shorthand and spent about 400 million yen developing a new method for preparing minutes. Under the new method, images and voices from sessions that are aired live at the Diet are fed into a computer and an operator types text while listening via a headset. The system is designed to speed up the typing process. For example, when the operator wants to listen to a certain part of the text again, all he or she needs to do is work a foot switch connected to the computer...more...

When I first saw this story, I had a vision of trained stenographers being replaced by schoolgirls with mobile phones and Diet proceedings being peppered with emoji.

[kurohinge1]

. . . When I first saw this story, I had a vision of trained stenographers being replaced by schoolgirls . . .

I suspect those visions have little to do with the story.

For example, if I say "penguin", do you also have visions of a Japanese schoolgirl?

[gomichild]

The chamber also decided to gradually abolish shorthand and spent about 400 million yen developing a new method for preparing minutes.

This doesn't really compute for me... how much were they paying the stenographers? Much less than the new "operators"?