What does this Japanese inscription mean?
November 16, 2010 8:33 AM   Subscribe

My son has been given what he's been told is a decorative fuchi (collar) from a katana. It has some Japanese characters inscribed on it, and he's desperate to find out what it means - he has been told it's a name, but we have no way of knowing. Here are a couple of pictures. Any ideas? Hopefully it doesn't translate as 'Happy Toy Company'. Thanks all.
posted by reynir to Writing & Language (8 answers total)
 
Your pictures aren't really good enough for me to make out the top and bottom characters. The middle one is 元, though.

If you could find a camera with a macro mode, and take a square picture (straight down, I mean, not from an angle) of the characters in higher resolution, it would be easier to work out what it says.

(The orientation with the text in a vertical column is the correct one.)
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:23 AM on November 16, 2010


Best answer: The first two characters are pretty clearly and . I'm having a hard time making out the third character, but since I can't find any Japanese compounds that start with 秀元, I'm fairly sure it's the family name "Hidemoto" (pronounced he-day-mow-tow). The character I can't make out is likely a given name since the standard order in Japanese is is family name first.
posted by Cogito at 9:31 AM on November 16, 2010


Maybe the last one is some variation on 巫 ? That circular stroke at the bottom is throwing me for a loop though...
posted by dubitable at 9:33 AM on November 16, 2010


Response by poster: Thanks for the thoughts so far everyone.

I've uploaded another image (it's about 800k, and is now the first in the gallery) to see if that helps any.
posted by reynir at 10:25 AM on November 16, 2010


No, it's only 27K. Looks like Dropbox is resizing and rerendering the image.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:40 AM on November 16, 2010


Response by poster: Ah. I've now put it in the ordinary dropbox public folder, not the photo folder, and this should download as the larger file.
posted by reynir at 10:52 AM on November 16, 2010


Best answer: I showed this to my (Japanese native) Sister-In-Law, she confirmed that the top two characters read "Hidemoto" like Cogito said. Her comment on the bottom character was "Final letter is hard to read." She came up with a couple of suggestions though: it could be a kanji character that is either really obscure or archaic (depending on the antiquity of the fuchi), the character could just be really stylized (equivalent to an elaborate signature), or (long shot) it could be a Chinese character not used in typically used in Japanese writing.

So it's definitely the family name "Hidemoto." Since Japanese script is read from top to bottom, and Japanese names are presented [Family Name] [Given Name], it's probable that the odd character at the bottom is someone's first name. It'd be useful to know how old the fuchi is at this point. Only a subset of kanji are currently used for Japanese names (I think this may actually be a law), but I don't think this applies to older names; it's kinde of likke olde non-standdard spellings. I'd wager that the kanji spell out someone with an odd or uncommon first name, maybe the maker's, but probably the former owner's name.
posted by Panjandrum at 2:18 PM on November 16, 2010


Response by poster: That's great, thank you all. I don't know the provenance of the fuchi (my son of course is convinced that it belongs to a great samurai), so can't guess at the age.
posted by reynir at 2:31 PM on November 16, 2010


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