Tag: kanji | RocketNews24

We Japanese are no strangers to Chinese characters (or kanji, in Japanese). The ancient letters from China make up a crucial part of our own written language, and we have to say the complex yet elegant form of kanji can seem strikingly cool (except when we had to practice and learn all those letters in grade school), even for those of us who use the letters everyday. So we can certainly understand how these characters could hold a mysterious fascination for people from countries where kanji isn’t used at all. T-shirts featuring kanji are a common enough sight in many parts of the world after all, and for people who prefer to wear their favorite Chinese characters in a more, shall I say, permanent way, I guess tattoos are always an option, right?

Well, at least, that’s the option the person in the picture above apparently went for. But she most likely didn’t know what the letters she was getting tattooed on her back actually meant, the poor girl … Read More

It’s not easy being a kid. If you’re fat the other kids make fun of you; if you’re skinny the other kids make fun of you; if you get good grades they make fun of you… Kids don’t need a genuine reason to be tease their peers; they can make one up just as easily.

But when your parents name you after their favourite thing – be it the weather on the day you were born, the place you were conceived or their favourite snack food – things get awkward for poor little Windy Latrine Butterfinger.

Although authorities have been known to intervene when parents try to call their child things like Akuma, meaning devil in Japanese, and @ as once rejected by authorities in China, the vast majority slip through the net. Since kanji, the Chinese characters used in the Japanese writing system, are based on meaning and can be read in a variety of different ways, parents giving their child a kanji-based name (some choose phonetic kana script, but this is usually just for girls) are able to choose both their child’s name and how it will be written.

For the most part, parents choose names that convey their love or hopes for their offspring, but in the land of otaku nerdism, sometimes parents just can’t help but get carried away.

Masthead