It’s about 2 inches in length, 1/2 inch wide. Made of wood. Painted, and the letters are engraved. From Japan. It has a made in Japan sticker on it.
Background - My mother was an artist (at times in her life). I found this in one of my mothers art tool boxes. It almost looks like a piece of charcoal or or other medium. It’s not. It’s not a burnisher, or if it is, it was never used.
Her sister was in Japan in the early 50’s. It must from my mothers sister to her, bought in Japan. Nobody has any Japanese heritage in our family.
I almost think it may be some sort of amulet or charm.
Any ideas?
I found it with another odd piece that I can’t identify. But don’t know if they are related. But it is some sort of art tool. Probably to grind and mix pastels, chalk. Donno. I’m surprised I never saw this before. My mom and I used to draw together. Often charcoal, graphite and pastels.
This piece is heavy. Not magnetic. It’s pretty smooth. But was glued to something at some point.
According to my daughter it’s an inkstone for Japanese calligraphy, called “sumi.” It appears the top picture is for black ink, and the middle for blue ink. Pour water over the stones and it collects in container in the bottom photo. Go to YouTube for “How to prepare Sumi ink” for an idea of how they’re used.
However, she can’t identify the markings in the photos, as they do not represent any Japanese lettering she’s familiar with.
Google Lens says they’re in Traditional Chinese. And not that I’m any kind of expert, but it does look more like Chinese than Japanese symbols.
The first translates to “Produced by Baohantang”, and the second to “Chaoyang Ink”. Which seems plausible, given the other posts. Not that the names mean anything to me.
Bixby Vision on my phone thinks they’re Japanese and translates the top as “Supervised by Howado” and the bottom symbol of the bottom as “morning sun ink.” For what its worth, which is probably nearly nothing.
With enough clues, we can probably puzzle out something. I did find this:
Bao Han Nin Xiang Turpentine Soot Black Inkstick
The bottom symbol is the same as the OP’s, though the rest are different. The “bao han” is too close to be coincidental. And I know there’s a lot of overlap in traditional Chinese characters and Japanese. Maybe some older forms? There’s undoubtedly someone here who would know.
These are traditional Chinese characters, which generally are used in Japanese. In other words, Japanese borrowed traditional Chinese characters, which may or may not keep the original meaning. And may or may not be pronounced close to the original Chinese. In this case, the pronunciation is different.
It’s an inkstone (it’s a soft stone, you rub with water on a surface, sand like grains rub off and makes ink). It translates as “made by Baohantang” in Chinese and “Made by Hokando” in Japanese.
The second ink stick literally translates as “morning sun ink”, which in this case I guess is literary license to mean blue.
The master/craftsman/artist that made them. Maybe a small company named after the master.
These days probably a corporation. I’m not up on Chinese/Japanese ink stones. These inkstones are ubiquitous in China and Japan.
Bought in the 1950’s in Japan for what probably seemed like a pittance. These might actually be reasonably valuable (half assed guess probably purchased for a dollar and now not worth more than $100) to an artist that knows about ink stones versus the modern ink stones.
Your ink sticks might be worth a lot more if the origin is from a serious craftsman. I’m guessing though these were just really cheap ink stones bought by the aunt as a curiosity. But, I could be wrong.
Japanese uses three typed of “alphabets”. One is Chinese characters. They retain pretty much the same meaning as they do in China. I knew a few of these from studying Chinese and was able to read a few signs in Japan such as exit. They are not pronounced the same, but in both languages they use the two symbols meaning “out” and “mouth”.
A second alphabet is phonetic. It was originally used by women as they were not given the opportunity to study the thousands of characters needed to be literate.
A third alphabet is also phonetic, but used for foreign words.
What you have are ink sticks and a grinding stone (the little tray). You put a little water in the tray and with great patience grind the ink stick to make ink.
The outside package includes the text, “お花墨”, the first character of which is Hiragana - a Japanese-only script.
Not to say that it can’t have been a Chinese product, rebranded for sell in Japan. But, I think it’s more likely that it was Japanese but they’re using older characters that have, in the intervening decades, been sidelined by more modern, Japanese-preferred Kanji.
