Your business cards could read "manga surgeon," maybe clients will see they should pay your Doctor Money ??

Still processing the part of this post that implies you've only been at this for five years, based on the quality of your work I assumed you'd been doing it since God created Adam

Looks fantastic!
(I already had this comment locked and loaded before I saw Brandon said exactly the same thing...guess you know it's true, then!)

That is my kind of pile!

I feel like if it were a legitimate publisher, they wouldn't be talking about "scanning" as a step in the process (since presumably they'd have the actual files?). Maybe it would be a step for older or more obscure titles, I guess?

Is this the most Paul Starr post possibly ever

I think we're on pretty much the same page, then--but yes, these sorts of difference between languages are part of the fascination of translating!

It's always dicey to assume some detail is trivial or not "necessary," but I'm with you that this hyperspecificity seems to be an overall trait of much Japanese writing, and could perhaps be finessed on the basis of "it reads as 'ordinary' in Japanese, so it should read as 'ordinary' in English."

I think there's a real discussion to be had about how much of this specificity needs to be translated as how much, as you suggest, can be translated by silence, assumed to be understood by English-language readers.