In the late 1930s, my late father had a Japanese pen pal. After serving in the South Pacific during WWII, he was part of the occupation forces stationed in Japan. Fortunately, he was near enough to where the family was located to make contact with them and help them with food and other things. When he was returned back to the United States, they sent several items with him - a small lacquered box with intricate carving on the lid and a foot-high statue of a mounted warrior in classic costume with bow and arrow. We stupid American kids should never have been allowed to play with it, and managed to break every part of it and it’s long gone,
The only thing that remains is a cloth that I think I remember being associated with the statue, though I may be mixing things up. It is red on one side with a Japanese character. The other side is white with three cranes in a circle.
I would greatly appreciate it if anyone could tell me what the symbol means. You can see a portion of the cloth with the symbol on it at the following photo bucket link:
I can’t see your pic at that link, Hometownboy. (Not that it would make much difference if I could, as I can’t read Japanese, but maybe some potentially more helpful posters are having the same problem.)
The three cranes in a circle is probably the family crest (“mon”). I can’t see your photo either at that link, I have never had any luck with photobucket links from SDMB. I don’t know why. Perhaps you could try imgur or something similar for posting your photo?
My pleasure and thanks Darren. Hometownboy, it must have been strange having a pen pal and keeping up relations during the war and after the war! I would love to hear more about that story one day.
Hello, sorry to interrupt your conversation. But I’m very familiar with this symbol as a Chinese. In fact it’s not a symbol, it’s a Chinese character, and it stands for longevity. This is a calligraphy work to congratulate the old man on his long life. Japanese includes many Chinese characters and Japanese characters.
Chinese characters are pictographs, so many of them can be traced back to their oracle bone inscriptions. For example, the Chinese character “飞” stands for “fly”, “人” stands for “human”, and you can easily see the meaning of their glyphs, just like a small painting. Unfortunately the character “壽” is too complicated to explain to foreigners what it means. But for Chinese and Japanese, each character is very beautiful and full of flavor. Note that I’m not talking about the koreans, because they abandoned Chinese characters for ugly circles.