Interesting Good Luck Flag
I got a call from a friend of mine today about a man having a WWII Good luck flag for sale, so we went to look!I was pleasantly surprised in the condition and I found the handwriting interesting..not the same style I usually encounter. I would be interested to see what the well wishers had to say if anything other than names is present.The flag is made of silk and has what appears to be pigskin corner reinforcements. Regards,Geoff
Nice flag! Written in the cursive style of calligraphy called 草書 sōsho [grass writing]
祈武運長久
Ki Bu'un Chōkyū
Prayers for Continued Luck in the Fortunes of War
祝出征
Congratulations on your Deployment
Presented to
山崎正雄君
Yamazaki Masao-kun
Mr. Yamazaki Masao
--Guy
Last edited by ghp95134; 12-11-2016 at 01:36 AM. Reason: Added "Congratulations on Deployment"
Flag
Geoff-
I really like the looks of that flag; quite artistic!
Thank you Guy for translating..... Do you know what the protocol was for students in order to teach them the various forms of kanji (sosho tai, etc.)? Did everyone learn it?
MichaelB
Don't quote me! Grade school students learn it as part of penmanship; I think if a student develops a liking for calligraphy, then that can be learned in a shodo-juku [calligraphy studio] after school or on weekends. There are school calligraphy clubs and lots of calligraphy contests, local and national.by MichaelB
Some people develop a liking for calligraphy but get caught up in daily life, then later pursue the study after retiring.
A martial artist I know living in N. California, Hugh Davey, is a skilled calligrapher and has won contests in Japan. There may be other non-Japanese/Chinese/Korean who are skilled, but I've not yet seen another American as good as he. You can see some of his work on his blog.
His work 無 "Mu" -- nothingness -- is shown below. His signature is 飛石 -- tobiseki -- Jumping Rock. [That might be pronounced Tobi'ishi, but I'm not certain.]
--Guy
The various forms of writing had a lot to do with the old social order/class of the Edo period. The block print style we write in today is actually based on how aristocrats at the Emperor's court wrote.
In contrast, the cursive style was mainly a warlord/Samurai style of writing. So just like modern Japanese find cursive difficult to read, the Samurai would have had difficulty reading our current aristocratic writing.
Farmers and merchants were mainly taught by the Samurai class and when the literacy rate was only 1.4% in France and 20% in England, 85% of the Japanese were already literate and these people read and wrote in cursive as standard.
But cursive lacked uniformity and was hard to teach systematically, so when Japan elected to introduce compulsory education, they went with the block print style and cursive was no longer taught. Since then, cursive has been limited to poems and other arts. There never really was a time when people in general were fluent in all the various scripts.
A great flag! I really must get myself another of these! Leon.
Interesting Good Luck Flag
Guy and Nick-
Thank you for the information with regard to the writing styles. I have observed at times, particularly with the signatures of Japanese Generals, that they sign in a very neat, deliberate, firm, blocked form or style that Nick describes more as the "aristocratic" form. This seems logical in light of who these subjects were. On the other hand, how much cross over do you think there was at the time with the more flowing "samurai" style of script? I ask this since many in the ranks of the military (particularly the upper ranks) saw themselves as the heir to the samurai as well. Perhaps the upper echelons of the military used the block form for their practical writing and practiced the more cursive form as an artform similar to Mr. Davey's examples... Very cool site by the way Guy!
MichaelB
With people like generals of WW2, there would have been no concept of aristocratic writing vs samurai writing, I only mentioned that to show how the different styles evolved, and that sort of distinction was only relative in the Edo era. WW2 Generals went to school at a time when cursive was pretty standard, but as in English, one often wrote names in block style for the sake of clarity. If they are quoting a poem they would almost always write in cursive. All early Meiji Army documents were cursive and that also has a lot to do with the fact that they were using brush and ink. Later Meiji documents are almost never in cursive. By WW2, personal letters you would often write in cursive, but business was in block printed style. The samurai connection had little to do with whether you wrote something in cursive and it had to do more with what you wrote.
Nick-
Thank you for the detailed reply- much appreciated.
MichaelB
Being able to write in different styles like that is not unique to Japan at all. Even in English speaking countries today, cursive is a dying form of writing not taught at school any more. If you are of a generation that learned both cursive and block print, ask yourself when do you use cursive these days?
My mother used to embarrass me by writing in old prewar kanji to my school, which to me was completely "misspelled". Every time the schools change what they teach, there is a transitional period when people get taught one thing, yet need to communicate with the younger generation in a newly modified language.
Soon future generations of kids will not be able to write Kanji any more without the help of a computer, so this kind of shifting is continuing as we speak.
Last edited by Nick Komiya; 12-12-2016 at 02:36 PM.
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