aka yoroshi
It started innocently enough — an art project between me and the wife to create collage versions of images from the Japanese Hanafuda playing card deck to hang in our living room. She had acquired the cards while in Asia, and on more than one occasion we've taught ourselves how to play the game, and subsequently forgotten it again. Either way, it looked to be a fun little project, and the resulting finished product would serve as a nice representation of several of our interests (Asian stuff, gaming, etc).
We each had an IKEA three-part Ribba frame, in which to represent three cards side by side. The cards I chose (both for their imagery and their simplicity of collaging) were the following:
The 20 point card of the Susuki (Pampas Grass) suit, showing a full moon over the grass.
The 10 point card of the Susuki suit, showing a trio of geese flying over the grass.
And the kicker, the 5 point ribbon card of the Matsu (Pine) suit, showing a poetry ribbon fluttering amongst the pine trees.
Where the issue came in was on that last one, because from an execution perspective it was the hardest one to get just right (the birds on the other one turned out to be quite a bit easier, ironically), and secondly, because, well, I don't speak Japanese. The issue there is that I had no idea what the real card says, and having limited resources in terms of paper to work with for a collage, sort of went with the one that was vaguely the right colour and had similar script on it — meaning I also had no idea what my collage version of the card says, with a potential that it parroted some completely random phrase.
You might think I would have researched all this before I glued it all together, but that would have been altogether too intelligent.
So, once the thing was already hanging on the wall, I decided to copy down the hiragana from the collage version and look it up online.
You also might think this would be relatively easy, but not so much for a Japanese-challenged individual like myself, and after a fair bit of decoding, I finally determined that おひなさま transliterates to "ohinosama," which is a type of traditional doll, for which the paper was presumably a wrapping. At this point I felt pretty lucky — of all the products this paper could have been the wrapper for, it turned out to be something pretty nice, and fairly connotation-neutral at that (sure, the dolls are often used to capture the evil spirits away from young girls, but I'm willing to let that pass).
Of course, this little bit of research made me wonder what the original banner on the card itself says, and that — the part you'd think would be really easy, since these cards are used by millions of people and all have more or less the same traditional design — turned out to be the hardest part. Because, you see, it seems no one can really agree on what that damn ribbon says at all.
My wife had originally told me that the ribbon contained "just good luck phrases in general, but I have no idea what it actually is."
People generally agree that it's あ [something] よろし ("a [something] yoroshi"), and many people agree there's an "aka" in there somewhere, but is that "aka yoroshi" or "aka no yoroshi?"
The problem seems to stem from the extra little squiggle just under the あ, and its proximity to the の.
Internet School of Thought A says the squiggle is nothing, thus giving "ano yoroshi."
Internet School of Thought B says that in Japanese calligraphy, a あ with an extra squiggle on the bottom is shorthand for "aka", thus the whole thing is "aka no yoroshi."
And Internet School of Thought C says that in Japanese calligraphy, a の-looking character with that squiggle just over it is not Hiragana at all, but actually the Kanji character 可 which was sometimes used in the past phonetically to signify "ka," hence "aka yoroshi."
So at the end of it all, what does this all mean? Version B and Version C mean almost exactly the same thing ("no" is a particle in Japanese used between words when the first modifies or describes the second), and the definition is roughly "red good" or "red alright." The speculation is that it's "red" because the ribbon is red, sort of, and "alright" because the ribbon card is worth 5 points, which is not bad, but not the best either. So, um, sure.
And speaking of "um, sure," that brings us to the other version, and is literally more or less what Version A means: "Um, alright." That's it. I'm not making this up, I promise. Real poetry on that pine tree poetry ribbon. . . .
So, at any rate, I learned a little Japanese through all this, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to offend anyone with my artwork, and most importantly I really don't feel too bad about my bastardized "doll" version of the card anymore, because, a little random or no, people can at least agree upon what it says.
We each had an IKEA three-part Ribba frame, in which to represent three cards side by side. The cards I chose (both for their imagery and their simplicity of collaging) were the following:
The 20 point card of the Susuki (Pampas Grass) suit, showing a full moon over the grass.
The 10 point card of the Susuki suit, showing a trio of geese flying over the grass.
And the kicker, the 5 point ribbon card of the Matsu (Pine) suit, showing a poetry ribbon fluttering amongst the pine trees.
Where the issue came in was on that last one, because from an execution perspective it was the hardest one to get just right (the birds on the other one turned out to be quite a bit easier, ironically), and secondly, because, well, I don't speak Japanese. The issue there is that I had no idea what the real card says, and having limited resources in terms of paper to work with for a collage, sort of went with the one that was vaguely the right colour and had similar script on it — meaning I also had no idea what my collage version of the card says, with a potential that it parroted some completely random phrase.
You might think I would have researched all this before I glued it all together, but that would have been altogether too intelligent.
So, once the thing was already hanging on the wall, I decided to copy down the hiragana from the collage version and look it up online.
You also might think this would be relatively easy, but not so much for a Japanese-challenged individual like myself, and after a fair bit of decoding, I finally determined that おひなさま transliterates to "ohinosama," which is a type of traditional doll, for which the paper was presumably a wrapping. At this point I felt pretty lucky — of all the products this paper could have been the wrapper for, it turned out to be something pretty nice, and fairly connotation-neutral at that (sure, the dolls are often used to capture the evil spirits away from young girls, but I'm willing to let that pass).
Of course, this little bit of research made me wonder what the original banner on the card itself says, and that — the part you'd think would be really easy, since these cards are used by millions of people and all have more or less the same traditional design — turned out to be the hardest part. Because, you see, it seems no one can really agree on what that damn ribbon says at all.
My wife had originally told me that the ribbon contained "just good luck phrases in general, but I have no idea what it actually is."
People generally agree that it's あ [something] よろし ("a [something] yoroshi"), and many people agree there's an "aka" in there somewhere, but is that "aka yoroshi" or "aka no yoroshi?"
The problem seems to stem from the extra little squiggle just under the あ, and its proximity to the の.
Internet School of Thought A says the squiggle is nothing, thus giving "ano yoroshi."
Internet School of Thought B says that in Japanese calligraphy, a あ with an extra squiggle on the bottom is shorthand for "aka", thus the whole thing is "aka no yoroshi."
And Internet School of Thought C says that in Japanese calligraphy, a の-looking character with that squiggle just over it is not Hiragana at all, but actually the Kanji character 可 which was sometimes used in the past phonetically to signify "ka," hence "aka yoroshi."
So at the end of it all, what does this all mean? Version B and Version C mean almost exactly the same thing ("no" is a particle in Japanese used between words when the first modifies or describes the second), and the definition is roughly "red good" or "red alright." The speculation is that it's "red" because the ribbon is red, sort of, and "alright" because the ribbon card is worth 5 points, which is not bad, but not the best either. So, um, sure.
And speaking of "um, sure," that brings us to the other version, and is literally more or less what Version A means: "Um, alright." That's it. I'm not making this up, I promise. Real poetry on that pine tree poetry ribbon. . . .
So, at any rate, I learned a little Japanese through all this, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to offend anyone with my artwork, and most importantly I really don't feel too bad about my bastardized "doll" version of the card anymore, because, a little random or no, people can at least agree upon what it says.