[thread=369779]Paging SaintCad[/thread]… Did you get it? Would you like to join in here?
Sleel, I like your notion that the different styles might have contribute to the aesthetics of character tattoos, but I’ve seen probably a hundred done in dyslexic-third-grader-with-palsy handwriting for each one in master-artist calligraphy. Do you think this is a case of “Can’t find the good stuff” or “don’t care what the good stuff is, just so long as it looks pretty”?
I’m not! But yeah, that would be awkward. A Japanese exchange student that I was in theatre with in college translated my tattoo as “forever,” so I know that my research was correct.
Classical Latin doesn’t use the letter “U”. Nor lower case. The motto should read:
FIAT IVSTITIA RVAT CAELVM
I think you’re on to something. My best friend made me a stain glass of the character for “Friendship” and it is really interesting. I personally think it looks like a three-legged man running 
If you look at old books written in English there’s often an effort to decorate the first letter of a chapter, but many of the Asian characters people choose for meaning or decoration are already artistic in comparison. Maybe familiarity breeds indifference…
heraldic nitpick I just wanted to let you know that there is no such thing as a “family crest”. Cameron of Lochiel (“Cameron of Cameron”) is entitled to the arms and crest of Clan Cameron, no-one else is. It’s called “Usurpation”. You’re welcome to use the motto, of course. Just a pet peeve.
My brother, not boyfriend (although yes, my boyfriend (husband!) is cute!)
My brother’s not too shabby, but I don’t think you’re his type 
Personally, I liked Murakami’s “Sputnik Sweetheart” best.
If you want to read “Dance Dance Dance”, I’d suggest you read “A wild sheep chase” first, since it does involve some of the same characters (though the stories are only somewhat intertwined… not really a sequel, but Dance takes place a few years later, with the same main character.
“Kafka on the shore” is next for me, and then I think I’ll reread “Hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world” since I don’t think I quite grasped Murakami’s style when I first read it (the first of his that I read).
<minor hijack> There’s something I meant to ask before: is kanji a proper noun? I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be capitalized or not. </minor hijack>
I’ve rarely seen it capitalized. To me, it feels like the words “character” or “letter” in English. You wouldn’t capitalize those, so I wouldn’t treat kanji as a proper noun.
Oh, another thing, I think that kanji should be treated as a non-count noun by default. I’ve seen people write “kanjis” before and it grates on me something awful. First, Japanese doesn’t have plurals, second, English has a precedent with things like rice, water, and bread having a different usage pattern from ——s. It’s not like I’m the God of English Referents for Japanese, but in my opinion, it should be “hundreds of kanji” not “hundreds of kanjis”.
Notice I deliberately left off the italics with the plural s form. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re using English grammar to transform the word, it’s not a foreign word anymore, it’s English, and doesn’t deserve the distinguishing italics anymore.
This anal-retentive interlude was brought to you by the kana “ku” and “so”, and the kanji “ba” (horse) and “ka” (deer).