I live Alberta, Canada. I have noticed that several people here (all Caucasian) have “Japanese” symbols/writing tatooed on them… usually either their shoulders, arms or ankles. These are not just young “kids” either, they are usually more middle aged (30-40) year old people.
Is there some deep meaning behind these symbols that I don’t understand? I’m noticing it more and more.
Sorry, I can’t give an example of any of the “specific” symbols, so I may be exceedingly vague with this post!
Are you sure its Japanese and not Chinese characters?
I’d guess its typical stuff like “Double Happiness” or “Love”. The fact that no one else is likely to be able to decipher the symbol makes it all the more attractive.
You’re absolutely correct, it could be Chinese but some of them are vertical to their adjoining letters, which in my admittidly sparse knowledge, led me to think they were Japanese.
Asian character tattoos are a fad these days. Just like Maori ones were a few years ago.
Next year they’ll all be getting Minbari bones on their heads.
If they were written “vertically” then it’s Chinese. Japanes is written horizontally.
All I can say is- they are both an annoyance and occasionally good fun to people who can read them. People get some really stupid crap tatooed on them thinking it says something it doesn’t.
No! Either character set can be written either way. In fact, Japanese characters are Chinese characters. Sheesh, remember when only people who knew what they were talking about contributed to General Questions threads.
I believe traditionally Chinese was written from top to bottom and from left to right but today it is most often written left to right, top to bottom, like English. But it can be written any way, especially if you are talking about tatoos. Heck English can be written in any direction for signs, etc.
Japanese has different sets of characters: katakana, hiragana, and kanji. Katakana is angular and very distinguishable from Chinese characters. Hiragana is also quite easily distinguishable from Chinese while kanji is not easily distinguishable because they are Chinese signs (although slightly different.
Asian characters look cool and exotic. Period.
And we have a WINNER!!
Cool and exotic? I guess if you’re easily amused, but it’s the best reason I’ve heard yet!
Japanes might be; however, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean all make use of writing either vertically or horizontally, depending on the desired effect. & out of my idle curiosity, would you care to share why you made that statement?
With such a bold statement, I have to nitpick. Only some Japanese characters are Chinese characters. The Japanese have 3 character sets the use in writing, 1 of which is Chinese, the other two are not.
I have seen some funny characters on t-shirts in the UK. Also one famous pop star is supposed to have been tattooed with the characters for “woman” (I have seen photos of it.) But unfortunately she chose the characters which read “josei” which is what is written on toilets! It does mean “woman” but it is kind of a flat meaning, rather like “female” It doesn’t have any of the “sexy, mesmerising, strong, resiliant, wonderful, feminine WOMAN” about it that I think she thought it did!
I have to say I am enjoying seeing the outbreak of characters in the UK as for years in Japan I have enjoyed the weird English scattered everywhere. (My favourite was a sweatshirt declaring “We are all prostitutes.” )
BTW in the UK it is a fad to have characters on soft furnishings. Many times they have been reversed in the printing process to become mirror images of what they should be.
Once I was in an Urban Outfitters store with a Japanese friend who began laughing hysterically for no apparent reason. When I asked him what was so funny, he pointed to a shirt with a Japanese phrase on it and translated it for me:
“I am a stupid foreigner”
I didn’t believe him at first, but he was adamant that he wasn’t lying. And last year I saw shirts of a different design bearing the same phrase online, along with “Japanese girlfriend wanted” and other joke messages for the amusment of nerds and Japanese majors the Western world over. But I bet a lot of people in Urban Outfitters didn’t know what that shirt said. 
But it’s only fair, the Japanese have been enamoured of random English phrases for years. Go to www.engrish.com for some of the best examples.
One is Chinese and another is sort-of-Chinese.
Kanji is a Japanese mostly-ideographic writing consisting essentially of a dialect of Chinese writing. Like the versions of Chinese writing used by most Chinese people outside China, Kanji was unaffected by the simplification of official Chinese characters effected duringthe Cultural Revolution and used in China.
Katakana (a.k.a. ‘kana’) is a Japanese phonetic writing system that uses a subset of kanji to stand for the syllables that begin the words in Japanese for the meanings of the kanji used.
Hiragana is a Japanese phonetic writing system that looks like nothing else on Earth. It is syllabic.
And then there is Romanji, which is a Japanese name for Roman alphabetic writing. Romanji is not a Japanese writing yet, but it is taught in schools, and Japanese find it useful for foreign sounds. So it will soon be as Japanese as baseball.
The Japanese use their different writing systems for different sorts of documents. Kanji is very highbrow, courtly, official–but not everybody can read very much of it. Hiragana is the first writing system taught to children, and is used to convey childishness and cuteness. Romanji has, I understand, a sort of inscrutable foreign chic, like dropping French words into English sentences.
Regards,
Agback
Sonyadora: Those t-shirts are marketed by a firm in Japan called J-List.
Agback: The kanji in current use are a set of simplified characters promulgated by the Japanese government.
Agback is mostly correct, but let me offer a few nitpicks:
Katakana was developed as a ‘simple’ version of kanji to better represent the sounds in Japanese, and was an alternative to Chinese characters (or kanji).
Katakana and kanji are never mixed. Katakana is used to write loan words in Japanese. Hiragana is used with kanji, or on its own.
Oh, and prety much every Japanese adult can read kanji – you wouldn’t get very far here without it. A bottle of Lemon Water (“physical drink!”) sitting on my desk, for instance, has the product name written in Romaji and hiragana, but the side labels are all written in kanji and hiragana. Most store-front names are in kanji, too.
Sorry, that was a fairly hasty post on my part, both in terms of spelling and accuracy. I am well aware that Japanese uses Chinese characters, but my understanding was that it is generally written horizontally (although on a tattoo, I guess anything goes).
Sorry about that. Normal well-informed service will be resumed as soon as possible.