Recreational research into Feudal Japan
Posts tagged kuzushiji
Kickstarter Post Linkdump
Nov 6th (a Sembu (先負))
So, it’s been a year since my Kickstarter funded, and it’s been wrapped up for a bit. I’ve got some new stuff to talk about here, but first, for the record, I wanted to link to some of my Kickstarter posts that might be generally interesting.
- Introduction to Japanese Crests, the handout for the Japanese heraldry class I taught at Pennsic a year ago
- The Process, talking about translating and the joys of kanji, hiragana, and kuzushiji
- Oodles and Oodles of Variant Kanji, about variant kanji and GlyphWiki
- The Final Stretch!, talking about how O-umajirushi was actually called O-mumajirushi
- Status Update, about the mysterious “koshisashi oyako sannin-no”
- Update, about various biographical sources
- Sources of Excitement, about Shoshō Kisei Zu, a heraldry source from 1637
- Home Stretch!, about “Shoshō Shōki Zu Byōbu”, a heraldic compendium in folding-screen from 1632
Resource: Electronic Kuzushiji Dictionary Database
Jun 8th (a Sembu (先負))
Translating historical Japanese manuscripts can be challenging for a variety of reasons. One is that, despite the thousands of characters Japanese has to start with, historical writers weren’t content to just write them clearly. Japanese cursive uses “kuzushiji” (崩し字), or broken characters, hiragana or kanji that have been heavily stylized in any number of different ways. Since strokes blend together and shapes get simplified, it can be difficult to figure out the original character from the stylized form.
I just found a very useful resource for piecing apart these texts: the Electronic Kuzushiji Dictionary Database (page in Japanese). It lets you put in a character and see historical cursive versions of that character, with dated citations going back at least as far as the 16th century. While this isn’t super-useful if you’re totally uncertain, it can really help confirm guesses and narrow down possibilities for characters in manuscripts, and electronic dictionaries are nice and quick to search.
Hat tip: Naruhodo なるほど‘s “Introduction to kuzushiji 崩し字”, which is also a good overview of Japanese cursive characters in general.
