It’s probably the same with any translation but the majority of the time I spend translating I’m trying to make sense of the original text. Sometimes it’s easy and I translate as I read. Often times I spend hours trying to decipher a single word. ‘Shichiku‘ was one such example
Not divulging too much, in the next episode a certain someone receives a sword wound in the area between ‘katasaki‘ – the part where the neck meets the shoulder – and somewhere around ‘shichiku‘. It’s written as ‘七九’, numbers seven and nine.
Now what the heck is shichiku?!
After a few hours of searching everywhere from dictionaries, a modernized edition of the text, to the Internet, I couldn’t even find a mention of it. I gave up and went on to work ahead, meaning to give up and just say neck, so I left a note at the problem spot just like I usually do. Good or bad I’m quite tenacious and don’t, or can’t, give up easily. When I went back to the spot several days later I was again driven into a frenzy of search but this time, after only another couple of hours, I was able to come up with a result:
‘Shichiku‘ is short for ‘shichiku-kuu’ and is more often spelt as 糸竹(空). It’s a shiatsu-spot at each end of your eyebrows. Obviously, it helps relieve the tension around your eyes after hard work on the computer for example. Wow. For a minute, I forgot why I got there and started working on my self-administered shiatsu. It felt rather good so I had to share it with you here.
According to this website, you are to press the spots very gently, pressing for 3 seconds and releasing for a second in a cycle of 5 sets. Pressing too hard gives the opposite effect of tensing up.
The Legend of the Eight Samurai Hounds 