Whenever we meet someone from, say, Thailand, we do our best to simulate the native pronunciation of their name. The Thai way of saying it is considered to be “correct”, and when our English-speaking tongues are unable to faithfully recreate the sounds, we sheepishly apologize for our substandard approximation.
I was surprised to learn recently that this idea, that people’s names have an absolute “correct” pronunciation, isn’t universal. I was talking to a Japanese grad student named Ms. Kawai, who had recently returned from a year abroad in China. During the course of our conversation, she mentioned that her Chinese friends and colleagues called her Chuan-He. When I asked why, she told me that Chuan-He is the way the characters that make up her name are pronounced in Chinese.
Apparently, “translating” Japanese names into the Chinese pronunciation is not at all uncommon. This speaks to underlying differences between English and Chinese.
The English written language is tied to sounds. The letter “M” doesn’t mean anything, it simply represents an “mmm” sound. Only by stringing letters together do we get words that have meaning.
The Chinese written language, on the other hand, is tied to meaning. Each Chinese character intrinsically represents a concept.
Pronunciation in Chinese can vary wildly depending on what dialect you’re speaking. Someone who grew up speaking Mandarin Chinese wouldn’t understand a word of Cantonese Chinese. In fact Mandarin and Cantonese are different enough that they would probably be called different languages (rather than just dialects of the same language) if it weren’t for the common writing system. Pronunciation isn’t absolute in written Chinese, meaning is. So rather than struggle with the Japanese pronunciation of a Japanese name, they just say it the Chinese way.
They’re all pretty good examples, but the last one particularly drives me nuts when I see it in movies. That being the cliché of “children being avatars for insight into the human condition”.
Years ago I saw the movie S1m0ne during its theatrical release (don’t ask). It’s a terrible movie, and probably one I would have completely forgotten except for one quote that bothered me so much that I still remember it to this day. The junior high school aged daughter of the main character is concerned about her father, and says to him “I want the old Viktor Taransky back.”
What kind of kid talks like that? Can you imagine when you were in junior high saying to your dad “I want the old [your father’s full name] back.”?? I know it’s totally nothing, but for whatever reason that quote still drives me nuts.
Lawson, the Japanese convenience store chain, sells chicken nuggets in three flavors: “Regular”, “Spicy” and “Cheese”. Occasionally they’ll introduce a forth flavor which they offer for a limited time.
The other day I went into Lawson and noticed they had a new flavor called “Pizza Potato”. “What the hell does that mean?” I thought. Was it supposed to taste like pizza topped with potatoes or something? I was intrigued, so I bought some.
As it turned out, the flavor was modeled after a brand of popular pizza-flavored potato chips.
So basically, they were pizza-flavored potato chip-flavored chicken nuggets. I can imagine the critique session when they were trying to get the taste just right: “Well, this does taste like pizza, but it doesn’t taste like pizza-flavored potato chips. Keep at it!”
It reminded me of a time a few months ago, when I went to a different Japanese convenience store and bought some “European-style” curry. It occurred to me later that I, an American, was eating the Japanese version of the European version of an Indian food. That’s the world we live in, I guess.
Apparently, hoods have a very negative connotation in Japan.
It was just a few weeks ago that I became aware of this, while walking to the mall with a Japanese friend. My ears started to get cold, so I put my hood on. Based on my friend’s reaction, you’d've thought I’d just put on a leather gimp mask.
“What are you doing??” she chirped, “Take that off!”
“Huh? Why?” I said.
“It looks suspicious!”
“Who cares? I’m freezing!” I said, leaving my hood on.
She’s short, but that didn’t stop her. She leapt up like she was shooting a free throw, and physically removed my hood. When I tried to put it back on, I got more of the same. She refused to be so much as seen with a hood-wearer.
We argued for a bit. “Are hats okay?”, I asked. She said yes. “Well, a hood is just a hat that’s attached to your jacket!” My iron-clad argument failed to win her over. Noticing she had a hood on her own jacket, I asked her what is was for. “Decoration” was her reply.
I assumed she was crazy, so I asked other Japanese friends about it, looking for backup. Much to my surprise, everyone sided with her. Even in the freezing cold dead of winter, wearing a hood is a suspicious act. None of the friends I surveyed wore the hoods attached to their jackets, no matter how cold it got.
Okay, I guess every culture has its own illogical social norms, but I find the hood taboo particularly contradictory, because it’s perfectly socially acceptable in Japan to wear a surgical mask that covers up the entire lower half of your face; people often wear them to avoid catching/transmitting colds.
Figure 2
Can you imagine walking into a bank in the U.S. wearing one of these? You’d be tackled by a security guard before you made it ten steps…
Every year since I first started this blog in 2007, I’ve written a New Year’s entry reflecting on the year that was.
As I looked over last year’s entry in preparation to write this year’s installment, I realized that not much has changed. I’m still working on the second volume of my graphic novel Tonoharu, and still attending Shikoku University on an East Asian calligraphyresearch scholarship from the Japanese Government.
So this year, rather than write a recap of 2009, I’ve decided to write about the year to come, as it will bring dramatic change to my life. My two-year research scholarship is nearing its end. In about three months time I’ll be packing up my things and returning to the States.
I’ll write a comprehensive reflection on the experience when the time comes, but for this entry I’ll limit my remarks to what it will mean for me financially, as this has been weighing heavily on my mind recently.
When the scholarship ends, with it will go the monthly stipend that has been covering my living expenses since April 2008. The stipend was just barely enough to get by on, but it allowed me to devote myself to my research (and cartooning) without having to worry about shrinking savings accounts or part time jobs.
With the end of the scholarship imminent, financial concerns I have been blissfully ignoring for the past twenty-odd months have returned to the forefront of my mind. I need to decide what I’m going to do once the Japanese Government stops paying my bills. This decision effectively boils down to two alternatives: looking for a “real” job, or continuing my absurd little experiment of trying to profit from my comics.
I’ll admit I’m a dreamer (no reasonable person would even consider trying to make a living as a cartoonist) but I’d like to think I’m not completely out of touch with reality. If my efforts to earn a living as a cartoonist hadn’t produced any meaningful results by now, I’d like to think I’d see the writing on the wall. I’d relegate cartooning to the status of “hobby”, and seek my fortunes elsewhere.
It’s just that there have been so many encouraging signs. I got a $10,000 grant to self-publish Tonoharu: Part One. It was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal and Entertainment Weekly. The first printing sold out in a matter of months. I got the two-year research scholarship thanks in large part to the examples of Tonoharu that accompanied my application. My comics aren’t anywhere near earning me a living wage, but I have made some money off of them. I feel that for a first-time, self published author, I’ve done quite well.
And then there are other comics-related revenue streams that I’ve been meaning to explore, which I never got around to because I was preoccupied with my research. I’d like to try selling original art and foreign publication rights. I’d like to try giving presentations/lectures about my work/Japan/East Asian calligraphy/whatever (some authors say that it’s through presentations, not book sales, that they make most of their money). In the past couple months I’ve applied for a few other art/publication-related grants, so that may bring a few bucks my way.
Also, I never really gave Tonoharu: Part One the marketing push I should’ve given it, since I left for Japan to begin my research on the same month it came out. When Tonoharu: Part Two comes out later this year (in the third or forth quarter, if you’re curious), I hope to give it the sustained marketing push that I should’ve given Part One, and see if that translates into increased sales.
So for the short term at least, I’m going to continue my foolhardy pursuit of a cartooning career. This will mean I’ll have to dip into my savings, which have already been significantly reduced by the stock market crash and breaking my ankle without insurance, but hey. You gotta follow your dreams… er… right?
Right off the bat I should mention that the above video won’t be of any interest to anyone who hasn’t played Super Mario 64, so you can just skip the video (and the rest of this blog entry) if you fall in that camp.
For those who are familiar with the game, an explanation of what the player is trying to do: after making the 1UP mushroom appear by climbing a tree, he tries to evade it while collecting all eight red coins, and then the star that subsequently appears. Another self-imposed rule is that he can’t enter the log cabin, as that makes the 1UP disappear (though he can use the bridge warp to get back to the top of the mountain, as the 1UP remains active in that event). If the 1UP catches him, he fails and has to start over again.
The first two minutes of the video are a little boring, but a highlight reel of his failed attempts that starts at 1:55 is pretty funny. His final, successful attempt begins at the six minute mark.
When I played Mario 64 I never really tried to run away from 1UP mushrooms, so it’s funny to see how tenacious they are in trying to catch Mario, even going through walls in their tireless pursuit. They remind me of terminators or something.
At the end of the video it says he tried for roughly nine hours before finally succeeding. Rock on, dude!
I hadn’t planned on posting two Koko the Clown cartoons back-to-back, but this week sort of slipped through my fingers, and I didn’t really have time to write a proper entry. Hopefully next week we’ll have something different.
Another thing I appreciate about Koko cartoons in addition to the line work is how unpredictable they are. This is true of much of the early work from the Fleischer Studios; you never really know what direction they’re going to take.
I guess you could argue that the “random for random’s sake” approach utilized in Fleischer cartoons is hardly the epitome of storytelling, but there’s something to be said for stories that actually offer genuine surprise. A friend of mine once told me that one of the reasons he liked the movie Eyes Wide Shut is because while he was watching it, he had no idea whatsoever how it was going to end. Most movies don’t have that sort of tension. When I see a typical romantic comedy I’m not really thrilled when the two leads get together in the end because there was never any doubt that they would. On the other hand, when I first saw the movie Show Me Love, *SPOILER* I was really happy when the two main characters got together in the end because it really seemed possible they might not. *END SPOILER*
So that’s why a little unexpectedness is nice to have every now and again oh my god an escaped bear just got in here and he’s eating me
Above is a Fleischer cartoon featuring Koko the Clown, the studio’s big star until Betty Boop (and the now largely forgotten Bimbo) came along.
One thing that really impresses me about the oldest Fleischer cartoons is how strong the line work is. In modern cartoons, lines are razor-thin and uniform in width, and don’t really have any personality. The lines found in the old Koko shorts, on the other hand, have an expressive, calligraphic presence. That this quality was achieved not in still illustrations but in the labor-intensive medium of animation is pretty remarkable I think. I can’t think of any modern animation that uses lines so artfully.
Last weekend my work was displayed as a part of a gallery show at the Tokushima Museum of Literature & Calligraphy.
The logo for the show, written/designed by my advisor Hiromitsu Morikami
It was a small show, with seventeen people each displaying one or two pieces.
My piece
A close-up.
My piece was a reinterpretation of calligraphy that was carved into the side of a cliff in southern Shaanxi province, China, in 63A.D., to commemorate the opening of a pathway. Since the original calligrapher was working on a course, uneven surface, the proportions and structure of the characters is unconventional.
Two weeks ago I put forth my theory that the beauty of East Asian calligraphy lies in the balance it strikes between Vitality and Stability. Last week I provided examples of how a sense of Vitality is achieved, so this week we’ll conclude the thought with a discussion about Stability.
As with the previous entry, I’ll focus mainly on how Standard and Running Scripts (two of East Asian calligraphy’s five major branches) address the challenge of reconciling Stability and Vitality.
Achieving Stability
I previously described Stability as a quality encompassing these traits: form, order, balance, symmetry, consistency, predictability, sterility, objectivity, and sobriety.
Stability as I’m defining it usually isn’t evoked as a positive when discussing art; you probably wouldn’t describe artwork that you liked as being “consistent” or “predictable”. But Stability is a critical component of East Asian calligraphy (and most other art forms for that matter). In the very least, characters need to be legible*, which requires consistent, predictable ways of rendering their shapes and structures.
Beyond this most basic need, it is also generally believed that good calligraphy should be well-balanced & harmoniously composed, two qualities that fall under the canopy of Stability as I’m defining it.
Structural Integrity I didn’t really appreciate the structure of Chinese characters until I tried to recreate them myself. Below is a classic piece of calligraphy written in 653AD, and my own attempts at it:
I’ve picked a particularly dismal example of my own calligraphy (from shortly after I first started) to more clearly illustrate my point. But even now, my best efforts pale in comparison to what I’m modeling them after. My work is legible; any Chinese or Japanese person could read it. But it just doesn’t come together as a cohesive whole in the way that great calligraphy does.
The characters in the best calligraphic works appear to be structurally sound, like they could be used as the foundation of a building. That this internal stability is achieved using only a handful of precarious, unbalanced movements (i.e. the energy records that are lines) is truly remarkable.
A detailed description of how this stability is achieved is beyond the scope of this entry, so I’ll just briefly touch on a couple techniques:
Give and Take As the Chinese written language evolved, it sought to communicate more and more complex ideas and phenomena. Many of the new characters created were combinations of previously established characters. A good example of this is how multiple instances of the character for “tree” were used to form new characters to express “forest” and “woods”:
When the characters were joined to form new characters, they were almost never just squished together without alternation. Instead, as shown above, certain strokes in each character would be lengthened or shortened, in order to accommodate each other and create a more unified whole.
Modulated Strokes I previously wrote the modulated strokes, or lines with dynamic, varying widths, were used to create a sense of Vitality in calligraphic works.
But this technique also plays a critical role in enhancing the Stability of a work. As I wrote last time, the horizontal lines of characters written in Standard and RunningScripts tend to rise from left to right, both to facilitate ease of writing as well as to create a sense of imbalance which suggests movement:
It would at first blush seem impossible to reconcile Stability with the imbalance created by the right-rising technique. Calligraphers use fatter strokes in key places of the character, in order to ground it and introduce a sense of Stability to it.
A good example of this can be found in the character for “heaven”, shown here in four different styles of Standard Script:
As you can see, the final stroke (the one that concludes in the lower right hand corner of each example) is significantly fatter than any of the others. This helps to ground and stabilize the right side of the character, which would otherwise appear skewed due to the right-rising horizontal lines.
Using these techniques, as well as countless others, calligraphers are able to have their cake and eat it too; to create characters that suggest both Vitality and Stability at the same time.
*****
I have a couple more things I’d like to write about East Asian calligraphy, but I’d like to take a little break from it. So the entries for the next week or two will be about something else. Stay tuned!
(*Regarding the “necessity” for legibility: actually, Grass Script is sometimes so chaotic that even calligraphy experts are unable to read it, and some avant-garde calligraphers create work that is truly inscrutable. But anyway…)
Last week I introduced my theory that the beauty of East Asian calligraphy lies in the balance it strikes between Vitality and Stability. I didn’t get much further than just introducing the theory in abstract, so for the next two entries I thought I’d go into a little more detail and provide a few specific examples of what I’m talking about. This week will focus on Vitality.
As I mentioned before, East Asian calligraphy is often divided into five main scripts:
Each script has its own aesthetic ideals & approaches to achieving balance. For simplicities sake, I’m going to focus on how Running and Standard scripts address this challenge. They were the last two scripts to evolve, and could (arguably) be considered East Asian calligraphy’s the most perfect expressions of balance between Vitality and Stability.
Expressing Vitality As I’ve previously written, lines could be thought of as records of energy/movement. In this sense lines are, in their very essence, expressions of vitality. Calligraphers have developed a number of methods to emphasize this intrinsic quality in their work: Right-rising
In Running and Standard scripts, horizontal lines are rarely perfectly even, but tend to rise from left to right. This tendency no doubt evolved for practical reasons; people can write more quickly and comfortably if they don’t have to worry about keeping their horizontal lines T-square perfect. But it helps to enhance the Vitality of the work as well, by creating a sense of imbalance that suggests movement.
Modulated Strokes Early in its history, Chinese calligraphers seemed to idealize uniform line width, but as the art evolved, calligraphers began to recognize the artistic/practical advantages of varied width in creating a sense of liveliness in their work. Virtually all East Asian calligraphy is done with a brush, which more than any other writing tool allows for flowing changes in line width. By slowly pressing a brush into the paper as you move along, you can create lines that go from the width of an eyelash to an inch thick in a single movement, with dynamic results.
Invisible connections
A sense of energy/connection can be conveyed even in areas where the brush has left no mark. Take the following example:
Technically, these are three separate, distinct lines. But it is easy to see how the brush rose off and fell back into the paper in a single flowing movement. There is a sense of energy that flows from line to line that connects them as a whole.
This is an important principle in East Asian calligraphy, particularly in Running Script and Grass Script. One of my professors suggested that a character should be written in a single breath, without stopping to recharge the brush with ink. Stopping in the middle of a character would snuff out its life. It is widely believed that calligraphic works should be written in one sitting, to suggest a unified, energetic whole.
Next week’s entry will be about how a sense of Stability is achieved.
