Article about: The IJA Sword Terms "Spelling Bee" If you had been a member of the IJA during the war, you would not have won the Spelling Bee Contest by spelling sword terms like, “Tsuka, Tsuba,
If you had been a member of the IJA during the war, you would not have won the Spelling Bee Contest by spelling sword terms like, “Tsuka, Tsuba, Kojiri, Koshirae, Tohsho, Shinogi, Hamachi or Koiguchi”, as those were all misspellings by IJA standards. Correct spellings, for those days, were “Tuka, Tuba, Koziri, Kosirae, Tosyo, Sinogi, Hamati and Koiguti”.
The IJA even had regulations on where to keep your scrotum in your pants. They spelled it out officially to keep your balls to the left-side pant leg. So it should not surprise you that they also had regulations on how to spell Japanese words in alphabet. Actually that was not unique to the IJA, but the IJA were only following national guidelines set in 1937 by a Cabinet Directive, which got published and circulated in the army as Notice 127, dated 13th January 1938.
The listing shows all 50 Japanese phonetic characters in alphabet, along with typical voiced consonants. Additional rules said, like in English, the beginning of a sentence needed to be capitalized, as well as the beginning of proper nouns. It was also allowed to capitalize the beginning of regular nouns, as done in German.
Notice 127 further said at the end, “Notice 4090 of 1929 is hereby superseded and rendered obsolete”. That is referring to a 29th August 1929 guideline issued by the General Staff Office, which I also attach below.
Last edited by Nick Komiya; 01-18-2020 at 05:55 PM.
They clearly don't show any "tsu" on that chart! Forgive my ignorance - but are the Japanese words for tsuba and koshirae using katakana? If so, why would they modify the pronunciation? Or are these pronunciations modern, whereas the charted ones above are WWII era soundings?
See here for details. The Army Style is now known as Kunrei-shiki Romanization, while the style you guys are used to is now called Revised Hepburn Romanization, a more modern version. So not only did kanji change postwar, how we even write our names in alphabet has also changed. Cabinet Directive in Japanese is Naikaku-Kunrei, thus "Kunrei-shiki".
Neither the way it's written nor the way it's read out in Japanese has changed, but the romanization has evolved to closer simulate the actual pronunciation of a native Japanese. So if you had been pronouncing them correctly, it should not affect the pronunciation at all. But who knows, Americans say Waffen SS like some brand of waffles, instead of Vaffen SS, so I have no idea how good your current pronunciation is. At least to me the new spelling sounds more accurate.
Last edited by Nick Komiya; 01-18-2020 at 10:21 PM.
You know, Nick ..... some of us don't like change!!! And like I always say - Communication is a terrible thing!
That was a great Wiki article on the subject. It seems the revised Hepburn is the system designed for Westerners (for some reason). I don't understand why everyone wouldn't be more interested in the Nihon-shiki system, as the wiki claims it was designed to spell words most closely to the actual Japanese sounding of them.
But then, I've always wondered why people of other countries use names of countries that are TOTALLY unconnected to the names used by the citizens of those countries (i.e. "Germany" vs "Deutshland" vs "Alemania" etc).
This reminds me somewhat of reading 19th C newspaper accounts of events in Japan. The one that sticks in my mind is the description of unemployed members of the samurai class as "loonin" as opposed to ronin.
Sword Terms "Spelling Bee", the IJA Way
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