Fuji is still in the silver-halide film business, but this brand, Super HG, has long been pensioned off and seems to have reached its apogee around the height of the Bubble, if this screechy 1990 TV ad starring then-idol Miyuki Imori and its cartoonishly supersaturated colors is any clue. …you may prove resistant to the latest technologyīeing a professional photographer, Juergen has an observant eye for the photographic past in the present. Weather-worn dragons at Ryuseiji (龍栖寺, “the temple where dragons abide”), in the center of Shimo Nita. It’s clear that the store name, unusually, is the given name of the male proprietor, as the lower character, 彦 (hiko, “fine young man”), is almost exclusively reserved for boys’ names, but in combination with the upper character, 新 (shin, atara, ara, nii, “new”), how was it all read? As a given name, it’s vanishingly rare, not to be found for instance in an online dictionary of half-a-million names, and it took half-an-hour of hunting before I had an answer. Tabako Arahiko, and another sobering lesson in the hardships apprentices like me in the language must endure. Rolled firehoses in the warehouse district. Sometimes, I swear, decoding even moderately antique Nihongo feels like being a British archaeologist trying to decipher Linear B or a Japanese cryptographer trying to break the Navajo codetalkers.Īt one time at least, the burghers of Shimo Nita were keen on their cosmetics. So confirmation came, after about two hours of investigation, that 良品康賣 (“quality goods sold cheaply”) in essence means little more than Wal-Mart’s slogan, “Everyday low prices”. The mighty Canon Wordtank of a colleague, however, proclaimed that 康 for “yasu” was acceptable, even though it garners almost no hits. Context strongly suggests that it should be read “yasu” (cheap), but Henshall’s 700-odd page guide to the kanji doesn’t offer that as an option, nor does Spahn and Hadamitzky’s 1,750-page kanji dictionary, although it does helpfully offer 安 (which is common), 廉 (which is uncommon), 靖 (only really found in the name of the shrine we all love to hate, Yasukuni), and 易 (here it means “easy”) as other ways of writing “yasu” (as well as a variant of 靖 so arcane I can’t even draw it). The much harder part was 康, now most commonly encountered as the “kō” of “kenkō” (健康, “health”). First, the simple part: 賣, I knew anyway, is the now dead-in-Japan character for 売, (“sell”), so dead that my made-in-Japan PC refuses to conjure it forth and I had to hand-draw it at a special website for obsessives to bring it to you. But below it is what proved to be a real puzzler, 康賣 ( yasu’uri, low prices). On the right we have 良品 (ryohin, good-quality items), which presents no difficulties, as it’s half of the name behind the Muji brand of furniture and sundries-I refuse to call them lifestyle goods-whose full and (indigestible to Western palates) name is Mujirushi Ryohin (無印良品, no-label good things, to be doggedly literal). Lovely character, though-looks just like a る (“ru”) being roasted on an open fire. The question of what it was doing there had me perplexed-it should have no intrinsic meaning, as hiragana is a syllabary-and the only conjecture I could manage to come up with, given its location, was that it is serving as an “etcetera”, a conjecture supported, although without complete conviction, by the literate native-speaker colleague to whom I showed it. An ad, burned still more soot-blackened by a recent fire than when I first encountered it, for butsudan family altars and funerary services, the now desperately faded late 1950s to early 1960s Cadillac hearse straight from a scene in Harold and Maude, decked out with elaborately customized bodywork inspired by the gaudiest of Shinto shrines these miya-gata reikyusha (宮型霊柩車, shrine-style spirit-coffin-vehicle) hearses are falling out of favor, perhaps because of their perceived vulgarity-some crematoria refuse to let them in-and perhaps because of their expense-around $250,000-and are being supplanted by plainer, duller and Western-inspired landau “funeral coaches”.Ī cornucopia of departing words and defunct characters adorn this sign for Mayamaya Shoten (馬山屋商店, Mayamaya Store, lower center): reading right to left across the top, 小間物 ( komabutsu, sundries), 化粧品, ( keshohin, cosmetics), 日用品 ( nichiyohin, daily goods), 雑貨ゑ ( zakka e, sundries, etc.) The first word for sundries, komabutsu, is being gently pushed aside by the second, zakka, while the mysterious ゑ (“e”) is a made-in-Japan hiragana character with a history of close to a millennium, variously pronounced as “we”, “e”, and “ye” in its long life, and which has officially been discarded since 1946, supplanted by え (“e”), although it must have lingered longer in the countryside, as this signboard is unlikely to be more than half-a-century old.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |