Translation: Kiyoko FujitaPhotography by Rob Oechsle
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SKIP (System of Kanji Indexing by Patterns)
Copyright © 1993 by Jack Halpern
SKIP is used in several comprehensive kanji dictionaries, including Kodansha’s Kanji Learner’s Dictionary, and the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary. SKIP data has been included in the kanji library section of this publication specifically to familiarize the reader with its ease of use. The SKIP system is Copyright©1993 by Jack Halpern and has been used in this book with permission.
The utilization of SKIP and SKIP numbers, whether in printed material or software form, is strictly forbidden without written permission from the copyright holder.
For complete information on SKIP and dictionaries that use the SKIP system, please see The CJK Dictionary Institute’s website at: http://www.cjk.org
INTRODUCTION TO
KANJI CALLIGRAPHY
The word calligraphy literally means “beautiful writing” and is an art form that has been used by nearly every civilization whose language had a written script to stress the importance of its culture, religion, and philosophy.
As calligraphy became widespread, it began to be used more for purely artistic expression. In Asian art, calligraphic poety is often accompanied with illustrations of landscapes, decorative plants, or other natural beauty.
WHAT IS KANJI?
The word “kanji” is a Japanese word that refers to a group of thousands of symbols that are used in Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian languages.
Kanji characters are sometimes called pictograms, or a number of similar terms, because many of the oldest known kanji characters graphically depicted the object or idea that they represented.
As more characters were developed, it became increasingly difficult to ‘draw a picture’ that represented the complex ideas of each new character. So, even though the idea that kanji are pictograms may be true for many of them, it is, by far, not an accurate description of the majority of characters in use today.
Since the 2nd century, Chinese kanji scholars have used six categories to classify kanji characters according to their make-up:
• Pictographs, or “shoukeimoji ” (象形文字 ), are rough sketches of the object they represent, such ‘eye’ in the graphic shown.
• Ideographs, or “shijimoji ” (指事文字 ), represent abstract concepts like numbers or directions, such as up (上 ), down (下 ), two (二 ), and three (三 ).
• Compound ideographs, or “kaiimoji ” (会意文字 ), are generally a combination of two or more pictographs that represent a complex idea or relationship, such as ‘east’ in the graphic on the right.
• The phonetic-ideographic, or “keiseimoji ” (形声文 字 ), account for about 85% of all kanji and are made of two main parts. Originally, one part indicated the meaning, and the other, the Chinese pronunciation. Though this type may or may not provide a hint about their pronunciation in Japanese, in most cases, you can’t guess their meaning.
• Derivative characters, or “tenchuumoji ” (転注文字 ), are characters whose meaning was derived from characters of a completely different meaning.
• And last, phonetic loan characters, or “kashamoji ” (仮借文字 ), are kanji whose meaning is ignored, but borrowed for their sound alone. In kashamoji, America is sometimes written (亜米利加 ), “Amerika”. This usage is like writing “UR2” in place of ‘you are, too’.
THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF KANJI
The origin of kanji can be traced back to the earliest known civilizations of China. Though little information that all historians agree upon exists, many legends exist about its inception.
Though scholars disagree, the popular myth is that the first kanji were invented by a Chinese scribe by the name of Ts’ang Chie who began to develop them after studying the foot prints of various birds and animals in the royal gardens.
Bone and tortoise shell carvings that were used for fortune telling show the use of kanji in ancient China as far
