I have officially hired a professional translator and bonsai professional in Japan to translate the 11-page Kinbon article (May 2001). I am surprised that this had not been done yet.
I mentioned this another thread (
https://www.bonsainut.com/threads/ebihara-nebari-musings.47464/page-2#post-816017) but thought that I should also share this here as well so that nobody else spends time/money on the same project.
I am looking into publication permissions and publication outlets (I don't have either at the moment!). At the very least, I'll summarize the article here in my own words.
Latest update:
Bonsai Focus owns the "exclusive worldwide copyrights of Kinbon magazine", as they put it.
In order for me to be allowed to share this article, they are asking for €150
per page. This would only give me permission to casually share the article. They explicitly noted that this would
not give me permission to have the article published elsewhere. They have no interest in publishing the article themselves (I offered the translation to them).
It's hard to gauge how much interest there really is in this article. One idea that came to mind is starting something like a GoFundMe campaign where anybody who donates $X will be a sent a copy of the PDF if we meet the funding objective. Of course, once the article is released in the wild it can be freely shared among friends and colleagues, so it's hard to say how many people would be willing to throw 10, 15, or 20 bucks at this to help raise the funds to gain this permission.