How Japan's writing system works, a summary of the past few years in kanji, and Japanese learning to deal with "hen na gaijin"

Kanji (KAHN-gee), the Chinese characters that the Japanese use to express most words in writing, is fascinating to Westerners because they’re so unlike the Occidental way of doing things. Kanji may be meaningless to the untrained eye — I’ve always liked looking at Van Gogh’s copies of famous ukiyo-e paintings, wondering what thoughts went through his mind as he tried to replicate the kanji strokes in his own work — but of course there’s a lot more to kanji that’s not immediately apparent. First, the characters are organized into groups based on meaning, with “radicals” (parts of the kanji, usually the left, top or bottom segments) giving a clue about the meaning. For example, words related to speaking, reading and recording of information have a unified part on the left that looks like a stack of books, and words like sea, fish, wave, and steam all share the same left portion which means “water.” When you need to look up a character in a kanji dictionary there are three ways to do it: by the pronounciation (not so good as some sounds can be written with dozens of different characters); by the overall number of strokes it takes to write (tedious when trying to find a complex character with 20+ strokes); or by what radical it’s written with (the recommended method). Of course this being Japan, there’s one and only one correct way to write a given kanji, and children who don’t follow the exact stroke order will get points marked off on their tests — although in reality, no one writes kanji properly once they get out into the real world, and styles differ widely, just like handwriting variations in the West.

One cool thing about kanji is the way it can promote an idea with a picture, create an emotional response with a single image, something we have tried to capture with our line of original Japanese themed T-shirts. Every year the Japan Kanji Foundation, the organization that promotes regular testing of kanji skills to encourage students to study harder, holds a contest to choose one Kanji of the Year, the one character that best sums up the events of the past twelve months. It’s quite an interesting way to look back at years past and reflect on what has gone before. Previous Kanji of the Year have included ai (愛, love, 2005) because of the Expo held in Aichi Pref. and the popular drama Train Man, the story of an anime otaku who finds love with a beautiful woman he meets on a train; wazawai (災, disaster, 2004) after the destruction of the quake in Niigata and far worse disaster in the Indian Ocean; ki (帰, homecoming, 2002), to commemorate the five abductees who returned from North Korea; and ikusa (戦, war, 2001), from the terrible events of that year. The Kanji of the Year for 2006 has been chosen, and it is….inochi (命), a word meaning life, in the sense of precious life, a thing to be treasured, in response to both good events (the birth of a new Imperial Heir) and very sad ones (the horrific number of ijime-inspired suicides by young people that has plagued Japan this year).

The Japanese have been dealing with gaijin for 153 years now, but it seems that they’ll never get used to our strange ways. We do things like wearing bathroom slippers while standing on a train platform, riding mountain bikes with those funny helmets on, driving our “open cars” with the top down in December, sleeping in the tokonoma, the recessed part of a Japanese room that’s used for displaying objects d’art, and buying chrysanthemums, a flower usually reserved for putting on gravestones, as a token of love for our wives. Although some Japanese think there are a lot of foreigners in Japan, I find this quaint, since only around 1.5% of the population of Japan comes from elsewhere, compared with 9% or more in Germany, and that figure includes a large number of Japan-born Koreans who choose not to take Japanese citizenship although they could easily do so. Of course, people aren’t evenly distributed over the landscape, and there are communities in which the foreign population has clumped together enough to alter the local culture, such as the nearby town of Oizumi, where around 20% of residents are Brazilians, including many of Japanese descent. As the 21st Century progresses, I think Japan is going to have to take a long, hard look at its homogeneous traditions and learn to embrace alternative ways of doing things.