welcome to camp telophase

I just started reading the scanlations of Silver Spoon, the current manga by the Fullmetal Alchemist mangaka. It's about an academically gifted young man who goes to an agricultural high school far, far away to get the hell away from his family and the relentless academic grind, and discovers that it's not exactly the walk in the park that he was expecting. :)

Anyway, he's at the horse races (the girl he's crushing on says she owns horses that are racing) and they're talking about a certain kind of horse and race, ban'ei, in which a breed of Japanese draft horses pulls sledges over a course.

On this page, one of the characters explains "Ban'ei races are the only ones in the world where the horses pull something." Which is patently false, as I've been to the track in Louisville, Kentucky, and bet on* witnessed harness racing, where they pull a two-wheeled cart.

I don't currently have a copy of the page in the original Japanese, nor could I read it if I did, so the question is: is it translated accurately, and the mangaka doesn't know (or doesn't care) that harness racing exists, or is there a semantic difference involved, with the original term used making a distinction between the actions of "pulling" and "dragging"? I think that if I were rewriting that sentence, I'd use "drag," to indicate the action is different than pulling a cart, but it's entirely possible the translator had no idea that harness racing exists and chose the wrong word for the circumstances.




* During a high school trip, no less! The teacher took us to the track! And said those of us who were 18 could bet if we wanted! I made a series of $2 bets, winning some and losing some, and lost about $15 total over the course of the evening, which was a good amount of money to spend for the entertainment value.