The opera “ Madame Butterfly ” was written by the Italian composer Puccini in 1904, based on the short story written by John Luther Long in 1898. It begins with a scene in which a Japanese marriage-broker, Goro, shows Pinkerton, a Lieutenant in the US Navy, a Japanese traditional house. Pinkerton is surprised to see that the walls in the house are slidable to suit his lifestyle. The newlywed Pinkerton asks where is the bedroom, Goro answers by sliding the walls. “Here or there! Wherever you … [Read more...]
Why the World Would End without Stroke Orders
“Help me. I am having an argument with my Japanese teacher.” A friend of mine named Jochen who just started to take Japanese lessons wrote to me one day shivering in a rage. He was practicing Hiragana, or Japanese characters, when his teacher told him that he must learn the correct stroke order. But he found his teachers words to be trivial. His Argument is: The writing process is not important. It is the result which is more important, how it looks at the end. He added, “I especially … [Read more...]
The Beauty of Inefficiency: A story about Traditional Hiragana
Reading handwritten letters from my Grandmother was always a difficult problem for me. Her handwriting looked like scribbling to a teenage girl, and I used to request that my Grandmother write more properly using block-printed letters. It was only when I discovered Kana-Shodo that I understood that her handwriting was not just a scribble but that she was using old traditional Hiragana, a heritage of deep Japanese beauty from the Middle Ages. Hiragana, or ancient traditional Japanese … [Read more...]
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