Category Archives: kanji

Taiwan architecture and political statements

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The main reason I haven’t been posting much lately is that for several weeks I’ve been extremely busy showing various groups of VIPs around Taipei. As the viewing floor near the top of Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building, is one of the standard stops along the tour, I usually take advantage of the bird’s-eye-view to point out some of the architectural features of the city. A few of these features are related to Chinese characters / Japanese kanji.

Japan controlled Taiwan from 1895 until 1945. The design of some significant buildings from this time reflects the desire of the Japanese authorities to put Japan’s stamp on Taiwan — in more ways than one. The buildings that now house Taiwan’s Presidential Office and the Executive Yuan (Cabinet) are from that era. Both are built in the shape of a Chinese character / kanji used in writing the name of Japan: 日. This is not a coincidence. (Before anyone asks: I haven’t seen any buildings, though, built in the shape of 本, the other character used in writing the name of Japan.)

Here are some screenshots from Google Earth, which gives satellite photos of much of the globe.

Below is Taiwan’s presidential building:
satellite photo of Taiwan's presidential building

And here is the Cabinet building, with north rotated 90 degrees clockwise:
satellite photo of Taiwan's Executive Yuan (Cabinet building)
The buildings on all but what is here the left side are additions that date from after the Japanese were forced out of Taiwan. (BTW, my old office in the Government Information Office is just below the bottom right corner of the 日.)

After the Japanese authorities were evicted from Taiwan and the island was controlled by the Chinese KMT, Taipei built a new city hall, and in so doing made an architectural statement of its own. Taipei City Hall, which is at the far end of a long road that leads to the Presidential Office, is built in the shape of two characters for the number 10, placed side by side: 十十
satellite photo of Taipei City Hall
Thus, this is 10 10, which stands for October 10, which refers to the starting date of the revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1910, leading to the establishment of the Republic of China. (Officially speaking, Taiwan remains the Republic of China and October 10 remains its “National Day.”)

click to enlarge satellite photo of Taipei, showing the Presidential Office and Executive Yuan in the west and Taipei City Hall in the east
(click photo to enlarge)

If you’d like to use Google Earth to view these for yourself, enter the following coordinates:

  • Presidential Office: 25 02 24 N, 121 30 42 E
  • Executive Yuan: 25 02 47 N, 121 31 14 E
  • Taipei City Hall: 25 02 15 N, 121 33 52 E

Also, the pond behind the former Japanese Governor-General’s house, now the modestly named Taipei Guest House, is supposed to be, with a little help from some decorative rocks, in the shape of the character for “heart”:
心

But I haven’t found any photographs or maps that show this clearly.

Can anyone comment on the architecture of Japanese-era governmental buildings in Korea?

evolution of simplified Chinese characters: dissertation

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Stockholm University’s Department of Oriental Languages has just released Long Story of Short Forms: The Evolution of Simplified Chinese Characters (10.4 MB PDF), a Ph.D. dissertation by Roar Bökset.

Here is the abstract:

A script reform was carried out in China between 1955 and 1964 by simplifying the shape of a number of characters. Most of the simplified forms adopted had already been in popular use for a long time before this reform, while a few were invented for the occasion.

One objective of this dissertation is to estimate the proportion of invented forms. To this end, use of simplified variants before 1955 was surveyed. Pre-reform writing turned out to be more heterogeneous than expected. In fact, already Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) handwriting differed considerably from the norms set up by contemporary dictionaries and model texts.

One aim of the script reform was to unify writing habits and make them conform better with established norms. To evaluate the Script Reform Committee’s success in this field, this dissertation surveys the use of different unofficial short forms even after the reform. Success turned out to be moderate. Many pre-1955 short variants survived, and, what was worse, new ones emerged after the reform. Particularly confusing was the use of different unofficial short forms in different parts of China. The existence of such local variants was confirmed by extensive reading of signs, advertisements, price tags and wall newspapers in twenty-one provinces, and by interviews with informants at four hundred localities. Results of that survey are displayed on twenty-four maps.

A few years earlier, even Japanese characters had gone through a reform which made many simplified forms official. Some of the new official Japanese forms differed from those which came to be official in China, creating a discrepancy which has at times been lamented. However, this dissertation compares the short forms used in pre-reform Japan with those of pre-reform China, and shows that most of the present discrepancies have roots in differences in Chinese and Japanese writing traditions, which bound the hands of reformers in both countries and enforced the decisions which were eventually made.

pigpen principles

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Newspapers and magazines have so much misinformation about Chinese characters that I seldom bother to mention specific instances. But I expect better than this from the New York Times, even though this is but soft news:

The two designers chose 20 stellar examples of a concept defined by the Japanese ideogram katei. It is the joining of two symbols — ka being house and tei being garden — that defines home in Japanese.

Oy. First, katei is not written with one “ideogram” [sic] but two Chinese characters / kanji:

家庭

(Somebody help me out if I got that wrong. I don’t know Japanese.) In Mandarin this is jiātíng, meaning “family.” Nishikawa Yūko has a long discussion about notions of katei in “The Modern Japanese Family System: unique or universal?” (Multicultural Japan. Palaeolithic to Postmodern. Donald Denoon, Mark Hudson, Gavan McCormack, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, eds. Cambridge University Press, pp. 224-232).

Second, Chinese characters / kanji do not represent an ideographic form of writing.

Third, the Japanese language is not defined by symbols. Language comes first, writing later.

Fourth, calling Chinese characters “symbols” is at best problematic; this is part of what feeds the ideographic myth. (See the second point.)

I’m all for good design, but it shouldn’t be explained in terms of myths. Otherwise, perhaps architects and interior designers should be putting functioning pigpens inside houses, or at least a little covered shrine to a pig. After all, if we’re going to be guided by how characters look, is not the very essence of “home” (家) in Japan and China defined by having a pig (豕) under a roof (宀)?

source: Homes and Gardens, Living in Harmony, New York Times, March 9, 2006

a geisha by any other character

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This has to do with Memoirs of a Geisha. But I don’t give a hoot about what is probably a profoundly silly movie that I have no intention of paying money to see. Nor do I care about Beijing’s profoundly silly objections to it. What I’m interested here is how Chinese characters were manipulated for the name.

In Mandarin, the word for “geisha” is yìjì, which is written 藝妓 in traditional Chinese characters and 艺妓 in “simplified” Chinese characters. The word for “memoirs” is huíyìlù, written 回憶錄 (回忆录 in simplified characters).

Thus, Memoirs of a Geisha could be translated as Yìjì huíyìlù, which it has been up to a point. (This is something of a surprise in itself, because Western movies tend to be completely retitled in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China rather than have their titles translated into Mandarin. There’s a tedious sameness to most of these titles, which tend to imitate titles of other popular movies and throw in 愛 (ài, love) a lot.)

As written in Chinese characters, the title in Taiwan of the movie is 藝伎回憶錄, not the expected 藝妓回憶錄. Note the difference in the second character:

伎 vs. 妓

The form in the movie title has the “person” radical 亻, while the original form has the “woman” radical 女.

The one with the woman radical is strongly associated with prostitution. Here are a few of the many prostitution-related words that contain this character:

  • 娼妓 chāngjì n. prostitute; streetwalker
  • 娼妓館 chāngjìguǎn p.w. brothel
  • 妓館 jìguǎn p.w. brothel
  • 妓女 jìnǚ n. prostitute
  • 妓院 jìyuàn p.w. brothel
  • 營妓 yíngjì n. prostitutes serving military units
  • 箏妓 zhēngjì n. zither-playing courtesan

Even a word for male prostitute takes this character: 妓男 (jìnán).

Here, by way of contrast, are some of the words containing the character with the “person” radical:

  • 伎巧 (also 技巧) jìqiǎo n. (1) technique; skill; craftsmanship; dexterity (2) acrobatic gymnastics
  • 才伎之士 cáijìzhīshì f.e. a person of outstanding ability in craftsmanship
  • 歌舞伎 gēwǔjì n. (1) (trad.) female dancer/singer (2) (Jp.) Kabuki
  • 鬼蜮伎倆 guǐyùjìliǎng id. devilish stratagem; evil tactics
  • 故技/伎 gùjì n. old trick/tactics
  • 故伎重演 gùjìchóngyǎn f.e. play the same old tricks; be up to one’s old tricks again
  • 賤伎 jiànjì n. inferior/lowly arts
  • 伎而止此 jì’érzhǐcǐ f.e. One’s cleverness stops here.
  • 伎/技倆 jìliǎng n. (1) trick; intrigue; maneuver (2) skill; dexterity; craft
  • 伎藝 jìyì n. (1) mechanical arts (2) expert skill

So the switch from 妓 to 伎 was an attempt to soften the connotations of prostitution, changing Memoirs of a Geisha (i.e. prostitute, in common association, whether that’s just or not) to Memoirs of a Skilled Performer. It also brings to the fore the phonetic basis for Chinese characters as it is no coincidence that 妓 and 伎 are pronounced the same. This same phonetic basis, however, is why the revised name isn’t really different; it just looks different. All this is the written equivalent of fancy footwork. It doesn’t really change a thing. Yìjì is the word for geisha, so that’s what is going to come to mind, not “skillful performer” — not unless the movie-title’s usage somehow becomes widely used and longlasting. But I doubt it.

After all, the translators could have adopted another word for geisha, gējì, which takes both forms: 歌伎 and 歌妓. So why not use 歌伎 and get rid of that troublesome 妓 character without bending any usage? Because the main word for geisha is still yìjì, and geji is also used for prostitutes (there’s that word again) who sang and danced. And maybe some people would have been expecting a musical because of 歌 (gē, song).

Although it might sound sophisticated for the translators to have played with Chinese characters this way, it’s not really all that different from naming a band Wyld Stallyns instead of Wild Stallions.

Memoirs of a Wyld Stallyn? Hmm. Now that might have potential.

source: ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ Lost in Political Din, IPS, February 7

ominous katakana?

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In Japan, an eleven-day-old baby was kidnapped from his mother’s side.

According to police, a note in which the suspects demanded a ransom was handwritten in kanji and katakana. Katakana has an ominous aspect as if to mask the identity of the writer. Perhaps the suspect thought that hiragana would show the peculiarities of his handwriting.

“Ominous” katakana? Are these the equations?
angles (katakana) = scary
curves (hiragana) = individual but not scary
Hmm.

Fortunately, the story has a happy ending. The bad guys were caught, though not through graphology, and the child is back with its parents.

Interesting that handwriting in hiragana would be seen as more revealing of individuality than handwriting in kanji. I wonder what the calligraphers of Japan — and those of China and Taiwan, too! — would have to say about that.

In another strange twist, the kidnapper appears to have used techniques from a mystery novel, 99% no Yukai (99 percent abduction), by Futari Okajima, which was initially published in 1988 and reprinted in 2004. The use of katakana in the ransom note is one of the parallels between the book and the recent crime.

A ray of light as baby is recovered unharmed, Asahi Shimbun, January 10, 2006

names, ethnicity, and colonialism

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Joel at Far Outliers has an interesting post on how Koreans chose Japanese names during the Japanese colonial period. (Spotted on Language Hat.)

Regarding name frequency in Taiwan, I once did some checking of an old version of Chih-Hao Tsai’s invaluable list of Chinese names (in Taiwan) and ended up with the top ten names covering 50 percent of the population. Now that he’s got an improved name-list online, I should check again.

Also here in Taiwan, few aborigines have taken the trouble to change their official names, now that they finally have an alternative to the sinicized versions that had been forced upon them by Taiwan’s officialdom. It will be interesting to see how the situation changes, if at all, now that new national ID cards are finally being issued. For more on this, see Romanization to be allowed on some Taiwan ID cards, including the link in the note.

Japan’s year of love

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The Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation has announced Japan’s kanji of the year.

爱

This is used to write the Japanese word for “love.”

With 4,109 of the total of 85,322 votes, 爱 beat out the character in second place, 改 (reform), by nearly two to one.

I’ve always particularly enjoyed the first part of the etymology of this character:

The top was once 旡 jì ‘belch’, for obscure reasons; it has become 爫 (zhǎo) ‘hand’ plus 冖 (mì) ‘cover’. Below are 心 (xīn) ‘heart’ and 夂 (zhǐ) ‘walk slowly’ (a foot pointing down).

(Please remember not to confuse the etymology of a Chinese character with the etymology of the word its used to represent; they’re not the same thing.)

Some opponents of simplified characters are particularly annoyed that the simplified form of this character, 爱, omits the “heart” element and inserts “friend” (友 / yǒu) as the base. But as far as I know, no one has objected lately to the removal of “belch.”

traditional vs. simplified:

愛 爱

source: ２００５年「今年の漢字」応募集計結果発表, December 13, 2005.

mobile phone with hiragana menus

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NTT Do Co Mo is releasing a mobile phone aimed at the children’s market. One of the phone’s features is that users will be able to switch its screen-menu system from kanji to hiragana.

子どもが簡単に操作できるよう、メニューやガイドの難しい漢字をひらがなで表示することができます。

I wonder if similar features can be found on other electronic items in Japan. (Matt, any ideas?)

The phone is model SA800i.