O-bon lanterns! Let's make some.

I haven't been able to get to the o-Bon festival at 松風荘 this evening, so I think I'll make lanterns for my windows. We need 季語 kigo, seasonal words, appropriate for o-Bon; we consult this kigo site, among many, and choose 魂祭 tamamatsuri, soul festival—what right-thinking ancestor wouldn't be attracted by that? 

Next, we need examples. (I don't mind writing badly if only I and the dead will see it.) Hao86—Chinese site, so I think 书法 shufa, vs 書法 shohou; both vs 書道 shodou, "the way of" calligraphy—has examples of everything, in multiple scripts, attributed—or, at least, it seems to be trying to, as some areas are a bit bare—so we look there. Hao offers five style categories:

行书　(行書　gyousho　semi-cursive/"running" script)

楷书　(楷書　kaisho　standard/regular/"block" script)

草书　(草書　sousho　cursive/"grass" script, very stylized)

隶书　(隷書　reisho　clerical script*)

篆书　(篆書　tensho　seal script, for stamping documents)

*"Clerical script" may be a euphemism, as Jisho defines 隷 as "slave, servant, prisoner, criminal, follower".

Helpful, for picking out forms we find interesting and would like to practice a bit. 例えば:　 

魂　

This one preserves the shape nicely, has the shape I like for the "animal legs" radical (stab left, sweep right!), and sort of casts off the little two-stroke oni 鬼 triangle, into almost a barbed tail:

(about the artist, YU Boqing 徐伯清, current, Shanghai)

...but this one is irresistible—look how it stacks the radicals:

 

(about the artist, ZHANG Ruitu 張瑞圖, 1570–1641 / works) 

Maybe handle the "speech" radical 云 (which I somehow think of as steam/mist/vapor, which certainly works here) with sort of a rightward dot, strong horizontal, elbow, take a moment at the end, launch into the vertical for 田; loop and tie, then into the legs, and the styling final dot that makes your 厶 but also seems a quintessentially 書道 thing to do. I think. Or something. Anyway, it looks fun to try.

 祭はねー。。。

Matsuri is pretty much a prayer/altar (示, 礻) under the "dotted tent" radical (癶); Henshall says the parts are literally a hand placing meat (⺼, with interesting/confounding overlap with 月 moon) onto an altar. Seems to pack in the connotation of sacrifice. Perfect for a soulfest. I'm not finding the right thing on Hao, so on to general search; we don't want to mix styles, but I'm loving this lean one, because it looks a bit like a person releasing 灯籠 tourou paper lanterns:

(about the artist, ZHANG Jizhi 张即之, 1186–1263)

In gyou and sou styles, the altar tends to look a bit like a hiragana ふ fu, which derives from kanji 不.

But it's fun when kanji look like stuff. Maybe there's some room to play with that "meat" radical, since it suggests both the moon (月) and night (夕)—great for a lantern. (I'm thinking of examples of 月 I've seen that recline, almost to a 夕-like angle.)

I have two big windows, so maybe I'll make two lanterns and not worry about matching styles. Next up: ink! And to choose a 筆 that will be kind to me. I have some glasses, so the thought is to write the kanji on whatever (paper or maybe napkins—not good paper, but something with some kind of character) and wrap it around a glass so the candles won't cause a 盆fire. Vamos a ver. イクゾね。

I've been hoarding recyclable egg cartons and an old window screen because one of these years I'm going to make paper, I swear.

Also on the list to explore: shufalife.com.

不安も心配も増えているね。

本当, some of the best learning happens from songs. Was just doing an exercise about the stock market and trying to remember a word for increasing, and into my head popped the opening lines of a song 先生 turned me on to—井上陽水 INOUE Yousui, 傘がない "Kasa ga Nai" ("I Have No Umbrella")—

都会では自殺する若者が増えている
Tokai de ha jisatsu suru wakamono ga fueteiru
今朝来た新聞の片隅に書いていた
Kesa kita shinbun no katasumi ni kaiteita

Written in the corner of this morning's paper: the city's suicide rate is increasing. That's the word I wanted—増.える fueru, to increase.

Songs are great for sticking vocab and grammar into one's head. Must pursue more Japanese radio.

On a related note, or in related news—the time has come to register for the JLPT, yet again; for a few years, when I was pretty much taking no part in the outside world, I registered but didn't actually do it. So, the eternal question: which level? There are a thousand guides and advice threads about it, but it's a roll of the dice. I passed the former level 4, I think more than 10 years ago; now there are five levels, N1 being the toughest. I'm encouraged by the shockingly low minimal point totals needed to pass—even for N1, essentially the equivalent of fluency, in each of language, reading, and listening, a score of less than 33% (19/60) is enough to pass. Of course, not knowing one certain kanji, or using で rather than に, or getting bogged down in parsing a spoken year, can cost you the item. N5 probably wouldn't be much of an achievement; N4 wouldn't look like much progress over the old 4 I have; maybe N3 would be possible. Will have to consult the guides. I've broken out the 扉 textbook and my kanji flashcards and apps; maybe N3 isn't unreasonable, by December. I'll need to decide within the next few days.

That the hospital and the beauty salon sound so similar seems a disaster waiting to happen, if it hasn't happened already.

病院 byouin hospital
美容院 biyouin beauty salon

(I mean, I guess if you're going in for cosmetic surgery.)

Just did an exercise in which my voice interface tragicomically misjudged the seriousness of the situation. "Ohhhhh.... You wanted the HOSPITAL?!" laugh track

Speaking of laugh tracks...I see I have some 70 drafts here, going back ten years. I should take a look through.

In a field, wishing for the ball.

I guess if one grows up with kanji, everything I'm always discovering about them is obvious, but for me it's a long road. Initially I balked at the idea of making up little stories to remember the radicals—as I have at hearing kanji referred to as little friends—but by now I'm 超 into that.

ATM I'm thinking about baseball, yakyuu. 野球. The first kanjus is ya, a field, the countryside; fair enough. The second, if we agree not to deal with 水 mizu water, consists of two parts, more or less: 玉 tama, a sphere or ball, and 求 moto.meru, to ask for or wish for. Ie, baseball is literally being in a field, hoping for the ball. (In my own school experience, only the first half fits.)

The next question will be the difference between 玉 and 球, noting that 玉 + 水 does make sense for a bead of sweat.

Now I'm wondering about 珠, also tama, but this time with—something—and from there 侏....

Also to be interrogated is the mental process by which I read 野 as inaka. Something in there must have read it by meaning; inaka is similar in meaning but is 田舎, a rice field (which looks like a rice field, divided into paddies) + a house/hut (conveniently showing yane roof, in the form of 人 hito a person, and 口 kuchi entrance).

For fun, here's a tribute in rice paddies to the Japanese rugby team, 2019:

(story)

For additional fun, note that rugby is 闘球, making war (戦 tataka.u) and wishing for the ball.

がはは >:-D （今朝の冗談）

パンダの好きな餌は？

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パンだ。

目を覚す (opening the eyes).

So I like to write things to hang around the house that may seem (or be) trite/cheesy but are meaningful to me, or that keep nagging at me to write them until I do, even if I do so crudely on telephone book paper. (I say it's OK to do something to an "ish" standard, so it's done, until you can do it better, vs not doing it at all.)

A while ago I was low-key obsessed with 息 iki breath, because I really do need a reminder to breathe and it seemed particularly relevant during COVID; before that it was 浅き夢見じ酔いもせず asaki yume miji ei mo sezu, a line from the mega-classic Iroha that I find worth keeping in mind—we will not have shallow dreams, nor live senseless. (酔 speaks to drunkenness and tends to be read as delusion, but the idea of losing one's senses in the world spans the two, more or less.)

At the moment I'm interested in 目を覚す me o samasu, to open the eyes; it's used for alarm clocks and regaining consciousness but also, at least to me*, carries a connotation of awakening in the more transcendent sense. (Can't be a coincidence, that the same kanji is used for one of the learning verbs, 覚える oboeru.) A good 書 to post near the bed, perhaps near the alarm clock 目覚まし時計 mezamashidokei, the eye-opening clock. "Wake up! Regain your senses! Enlightenment time!" I go through life generally "benighted"—the same idea in English, of being in darkness—so I'll check out some examples in the Book. I often wonder whether it would be meaningful to write Japanese phrases in just the kanji—目覚. I'll have to take a look at some examples of 目; relatively simple, but "eye" probably has some dramatic expressions.

*Not just to me; Jisho gives 覚 as a form of 悟・る sato・ru, "to perceive; to sense; to discern; to understand; to comprehend; to realize; to attain enlightenment".

Japanese House in Philly broken into and vandalized!!!

$2 million in damages, including to the Senju.

No punishment can suffice for a crime against art and beauty.

Surprisingly cold.

I've been quiet for a long time, but I still do my Japanese lessons every day; I've been in the diamond league on Duolingo for 250 days straight now. A sentence from yesterday has stuck with me, in that I find it kind of poetic:

谷川の水驚くほど全て買った
tanigawa no mizu ha
odoroku hodo tsumetakatta

The syllabication is off, of course, but—

the water of the mountain stream—
surprisingly cold

I find that stark and delicious. Like a plum saved for breakfast. (How would one write it? Maybe add some, to 57577 it. #hmm)

This Is Just To Say
wm carlos williams, 1938

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

A thing that's silly and works is a thing that works.

Over the years I've made fun (in my head) of Heisig for making up little phrases or sentences from kanji radicals as mnemonics for the overall meaning, but maybe I just didn't like his. Telling little stories about kanji really does help. Eg, 退屈 たいくつ taikutsu, bored:

艮 good
⻌ street
出 leaving / exiting / emerging from
尸 door

Bored: It's good in the street, so I'm out the door.

(Even better: 屈 also phonetically is shoes 靴, so I'm so out of here that I'm literally 退ing my shoes....)

Is it science, or is it art?

博. Thinking about 博物, 博覧会, 博識, 博士論文, somehow 博す and 博打—erudition and also gambling. (I guess a doctoral dissertaion always is a gamble.) 博愛.

Interesting thread on whether certain types of museum qualify as 美術館 or 博物館.

Life's been quiet for a while, and with COVID nobody's going anywhere, but I still study Japanese every day, mainly with Duolingo, jisho.org, the Imiwa? app, Henshall, NHK, etc. I'd like to pick up 扉 again, but the type is too small for my old eyes. Genki isn't quite challenging enough but would provide solid kanji and vocab practice...for when I meet my ホストファミリー. I'd like to pick up some more Japanese songs; maybe it's my years as a musician, but grammar and vocab from songs tend to stick with me. Eg, I always will associate 昴 with Meiko Kaji's "修羅の花", 古池 and 沈む with Buson, a thousand things with "地上の星", "アイドルール", "川の流れのように", "傘がない"...

Duo gives us some pretty heady sentences about economics, dictatorships, postwar reconstruction...so I can say all kinds of things I probably never will have to. Some users complain about apparent nonsense sentences, but I say, bring them on; we should be able to understand sentences that make no sense, as it's a different kind of challenge from reading material that fits into its context. We may never see a dog selling a hat, but we should be able to say we don't see one. NHK remains difficult; kanji always are a challenge, but I think I'm making some progress by giving in to Heisig's somewhat silly method of making up stories from the radicals. Some of them really insist that we do so: eg, I like to read 退屈, boredom, as what the radicals literally pictographically show: "It's good in the street, so I'm out the door." (The radicals in 退 are "good" and "street/way/path", and in 屈 they're "leaving" and "doorway". More or less.) I've read people refer to kanji as little friends, and sometimes they can be—though it certainly can be frustrating that a small change in radical can completely change the meaning, and that kanji derive from history more than from logic.

But progress is progress. A thing I love about Duolingo in particular is that I can not only study lots of languages, but also study languages in other languages, one of my favorite things to do—ie, cut English out of the equation entirely. One of the toughest things to do in language acquisition is stop first thinking of things in your native language and then translating them into your second. I consider it a feather in my student's cap when something occurs to me in some other language and it takes me a moment to figure out what it would be in English.

An issue with Duo is one common in testing, that with repetition the test-taker learns the item, rather than the principle. Some of the exmaples in Duo are so specific that to memorize the idiosyncrasies is the only way through.

And that funny feeling of being unable to read a thing but knowing what it says.

I still haven't done 書初め! Here we are, almost a month into the year. I still have my yearning to write a decent 浅き夢見じ 酔ひもせず; I did write each on newspaper and stick them on my wall, but I hesitate to insult good paper with rusty 字. (I miss studying extremely; if I ever were to get a tattoo, I think it would be of my 書 name.)

その国では体制を批判すると身の危険につながる。
If you criticize the regime in that country, you put yourself in jeopardy.

車を作るロボットを動かすコンピュータを作る工場です。
This is a factory that makes computers that control robots that make cars.

思ったより (more than expected).

My new favorite phrase is 思ったより (omotta yori), "more than one (had) thought/expected". (Just came across it on Duolingo, which I frequent for a bunch of languages, although I started for and still practice Japanese, and which I recommend, not least for its item-specific discussion spaces.) It's a simple thing, but I haven't come across it before, at least in studies, and it's a concise and elegant way of expressing that surprise. Feels lighter than, as in English, having to inflect the what as a comparative; you can just add the phrase to whatever the situation is. 思ったより面白いです。"It's more interesting than I'd expected." 思ったより高かったよ. "Dude, I didn't think it would cost that much."* 思うよりも役に立つだろうね。

*In more exact/"correct" English, 思ったより高い, I didn't think it would cost this much; 思ったより高かった, I hadn't thought it would cost that much.

雷鳴.

Thunder today. Funny, that the second kanji of a thunderclap (雷鳴, raimei) is 鳴, which also can be a chime or even a bird's cry (to chirp/sing/ring / make a small sound, 鳴る). The parts are literally a mouth (口) and a bird (鳥). Kaminari (雷) is a pretty unprepossessing kanji and might suggest a retro-fit from Chinese writing to a preexisting Japanese word—presumably related to kami (神), gods/divinity, as the concept often is—a cry of the gods—if the older form weren't 靁, same rain (雨) but with three rice fields (田) vs one. (Does this 雨 count as 雨かんむり?)

Interesting: Seems 雷 also carries a kun'yomi of ikazuchi—derivation? From Goo.jp: 「厳 (いか) つ霊 (ち) 」の意。「つ」は助詞》かみなり。なるかみ。《季 夏》 Meaning ika (厳) tsu chi (霊), つ being a particle. kaminari. narukami. (seasonal word for summer)

雷に
松籟どっと
乱れ落つ
—茅舎

ikadzuki ni / shourai dotto / midareotsu
in thunder, a sudden wind disturbs the pine trees; [needles] fall
—KAWABATA Bousha
(ish)

Speaking of that 乱れ落つ verb situation:

春の宵
身より紅紐
乱れ落つ
—三好潤子

haru no yoi / miyori beni? himo? / midareotsu
—MIYOSHI Midori (Junko)

Hmm. More to learn about this one and 紅紐. Some sources say that evening hours in spring suggest dropping a boring lover. ?

I'll have to look further into how to distinguish lightning from thunder; in Eng there's little if any overlap between the words.

お風呂 in Portuguese?

I have on a TV episode that's in Portuguese, and someone has just referred to a hot tub as the ofurô. Might this be one of the famous vocabulary crossovers between Japanese (お風呂) and Portuguese? Maybe in this case the flow was not from the Jesuits but toward them.

小澤征爾さんの名前の書き方 (or, How Ozawa writes his name).

For company while working, I have on the old (1950–1967) game show What's My Line?, each episode of which features a celebrity, each of whom, on entering the stage, writes their name on a chalkboard. Here's how the illustrious symphony conductor Seiji Ozawa* writes his:

小 澤 征 爾

Interesting to track the motion of his writing. He runs 小 into 澤. He reverses the motion of the first two dots of 三水.^† Writes the running-man radical (行人偏, gyouninben) as you would in gyousho and combines the last two strokes of 正 into a curve. The Xes in 爾 suggest there used to be something more complex within, but the character's etymology suggests that it's been written with Xes since forever.

*As it happens, Mr. Ozawa was not the celebrity on this episodes, which aired in 1963. The collective celebrity guest was Peter, Paul, and Mary.
^†Interesting, too, that さんすい means not just three-dot water but also, phonetically, sprinkled water (散水)., as if you could dip your fingertips into the suzuri and just flick them at the paper.

Bai ji shēng wù has got tensho.

Recently I've had some contact with a company called BeiGene, whose logo is in tensho:

I gather the Chinese is /bai ji sheng wu/ and that the /sheng wu/ or /shen zhou/ is biology (生物, seibutsu—or, without 学/學, shēng wù xué, then just living things)—easy enough to see the 生物 through the tensho! The source says /bai ji/ has no particular meaning, beyond perhaps a phonetic similarity to Beijing, the "northern capital" (北京; cf. in Japan 東京 Tou-kyou, the eastern capital, which in the Edo period replaced 京都, Kyou-to, the capital or capital city).

Some help from the China Trademark Office. The same company seems to have registered these:

The first two (righthand column) would be /bai ji/, then. 百済神州. 百済 seems to refer to an ancient Korean kingdom, "land of the gods" (神州)—Baekje?

面白いですよね。I'll have to work it into conversation with them, somehow.

Woke up thinking

初時雨かな

Better nine years late than never.

Surfaced, this morning, from an email I apparently didn't send to myself in 2011:

鮎の背に一抹の朱のありしごとし

Touché, 原石鼎.

鬼は外！ 福は内！ (Setsubun!)

Doing my daily Japanese reading a few minutes ago, I came across an example of  「鬼は外！」 (Demons, out!) Some Helpful Soul points out that this is said on Setsubun (節分), season-division (into Spring), which, as it happens, is today. Time to banish demons and bring in luck! I need to hit the 食料品店 (グロ・スト) , anyway, so maybe I can pick up some soybeans to wing out the door. For a demon mask, luckily, I can just use my face.  >:-D

The custom of mamemaki first appeared in the Muromachi period. It is usually performed by the toshiotoko (年男) of the household (the male who was born on the corresponding animal year on the Chinese zodiac), or else the male head of the household. Roasted soybeans (called "fortune beans" [福豆, fuku mame]) are thrown either out the door or at a member of the family wearing an Oni (demon or ogre) mask, while the people say "Demons out! Luck in!" (鬼は外! 福は内!, Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!) and slam the door. This is still common practice in households but many people will attend a shrine or temple's spring festival where this is done. The beans are thought to symbolically purify the home by driving away the evil spirits that bring misfortune and bad health with them. Then, as part of bringing luck in, it is customary to eat roasted soybeans, one for each year of one's life, and in some areas, one for each year of one's life plus one more for bringing good luck for the year to come. (Wikipedia)

I could use some demon-banishing and some luck, so today is the today for me, フォ・ショ.