Have you ever seen the Genji Monogatari in the form of an 絵巻物 emaki-mono, an Illustrated Handscroll of the Tale of Genji based upon the famous novel by Murasaki Shikibu at a museum or reproduced in a book? I'm sure you were surprised to see the beautiful and delicate paper of the Genji Monogatari illustrated from the book written about the year 1000. That paper is one type of "Kana Ryoshi". Classical Kana calligraphy has been written on beautifully made special paper. "Kana" refers to … [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...]
Words Become Art All Around The World
Introduction Calligraphy can be considered a formative art that uses writing as its medium. While typical writing is used as a set of signs designed to replace spoken words, calligraphy tries to be something more. Many of the first characters in history were primitive pictorial representations without a fixed form (Tomohiko,1967). Overtime, these characters became progressively pared down from their original objects and were instead connected with geometrical arrangements (Tomohiko,1967). … [Read more...]
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