Kanji Quotes

The word “to grieve” or “lament” in Japanese is actually made up of two different kanji characters — “sadness” and “resentment.

I will have you without armor, Kaz Breker. Or I will not have you at all.

When I was little, people often misread the Kanji in my name as Mon-De... So the boys flipped it around and called me De-Mon, as in The Devil. Demons plague humanity, but I wasn't doing anything wrong. Ever since, I've been uncomfortable with how people cheerfully unite against perceived enemies".

The kanji characters he chose to make up the name of his new company—nin-ten-do—could be understood as “Leave luck to heaven,” or “Deep in the mind we have to do whatever we have to do.

Ricci created memory palaces in his mind. Each item in the palace represented a series of concepts. The rooms and locations within the palace served as directories and files, similar to computer data storage. Ricci instantaneously learned, retained and retrieved hundreds of new Chinese kanji, to the astonished delight of Chinese nobles.

Kanji is an expression of the soul

The origin of the term kamikakushi, “spirited away” is said to be unknown, but in the end, it’s all about the same thing. Killing children in times of famine.

They have to be born, you know," the Third Rail says. "They don't come from nowhere! When a child sits in her chair with a clean suzuri and her long brush, she believes she is writing, but she is simply calling to these poor lambs, calling them to attend her, to pass through her. We can hardy keep up with the demand; the pollination season is intense. And yet, they learn fewer and fewer kanji as the years go by, and more and more English, more katakana, more foreign things. The graveyard is on another train, where turtles set incense on the stones of words no one learns in your world anymore, words passed out of reach of any mouth. It is important work we do. We hope you agree, of course, but we are willing to admit it foolish if you call it so.

To Ruth, at first, the Japanese words were unintelligible, like one of the sinister magic spells, spoken in Hawaiian, in the ghost stories Maile used to tell. But over the next four months, Ruth's six-year-old brain soaked up both the English alphabet and the Chinese kanji characters as a sea sponge absorbs water, and within four months she was able to join in reciting the kokun and understood it to mean: Let us become worthy individuals. Let us study together in a friendly atmosphere. Let us take care of our health by eating properly. Let us be good to our parents.

The Japanese word ikigai is formed of two Japanese characters, or kanji: 'iki' meaning life, and 'gai' meaning came or worth. Ikigai, then, is the value of life, or happiness in life. Put simply, it's the reason you get up in the morning.

It doesn't translate well into English. It means "whereabouts". A place where one feels like home, where they feel like themselves. She wrote out the kanji characters for him in the air - 居場所 - and he recognised their Chinese equivalents. The character for a residence. The characters for a place.

ரசிகத் தன்மையற்ற மூர்க்கர்கள் நிறைந்த உலகில் கலையை வளர்ப்பது கஷ்டம்தான். காதலையும்தான்.

Skylar laughed a lot in these scenes. He was happy. He was always helping people too—a whole section depicted him playing hero to the art majors as they gazed at him adoringly, and Xander glowered jealously on the sidelines. That made Skylar laugh in real life. There were so many scenes of him helping people. He was Mr. Friendly, according to Xander. This was such a better painting. This was how Xander saw him? This was beautiful. This is who I want to be instead. “I love this,” Skylar said as Xander cleaned his brush. “Oh, I’m not done.” Xander got out a small round brush and reached for the pink. He began to paint delicate, beautiful cherry blossoms all over Skylar’s body. There was writing too—Xander explained each kanji to him, that they meant he was magnificent, sensitive, sensual, artistic, charming, loyal, steadfast—he lost track of the words because while they were wonderful and the script breathtaking, it was the blossoms that did him in. He sees me as a cherry tree. A blooming, beautiful cherry tree. Skylar sobbed. “I love you,” Skylar cried, trying not to spill tears because Xander was painting cherry blossoms across his face. “I love you too, my sakura.

Alex held it up. He’d gotten the packet from a dispenser in the men’s room. The foil had a dragon’s head embossed on it and some nonsense kanji that didn’t mean anything. Holden’s brow furrowed. “Sobriety meds?” Alex felt himself blushing and tried to hide it by smiling. “Well, I’m thinking I may be in a situation here pretty soon where everybody needs to be able to agree to whatever they’re agreeing to.

There was no sudden twists or ups and downs, just stories of that person's everyday life. The theme was "growing old". There were no beautiful woman... For a current day work this is clearly taking literature in a bad direction.

The official JLPT guide states that JLPT N3 level is roughly equivalent to Japanese Grades 1 through 4 in terms of kanji and vocabulary content with approximately 650 Kanji made up of Grade 1 (80), Grade 2 (160) Grade 3 (200) and Grade 4 (200) and 3750 vocabulary

L'organisation de la société à l'époque f4edo se référait au système confucéen de classification des individus par rapport à leurs origines sociales et leurs métiers, shinokosho. Cette hiérarchie se résumait en 4 kanji représentant chacun un rang social, en partant du sommet jusqu'à la base. Shi désignait les guerriers, no les paysans, ko les artisans et sho les commerçants.

いつも　の

リンゴを

She was mixed--Japanese and American. Nothing. A nothing. A nobody. The 'kanji' in her last name meant "female devil." She didn't even know what her real last name was because she'd dishonored the family simply be being born.

there was a teenage kid with torn jeans and a T-shirt that said “I’m looking for a Japanese girlfriend” in kanji. He also wore a blue terrycloth cape. A sheen of grease painted Starry Night in pimples across the cheek bones and the bridge of his nose. Mud-colored hair sat in a rat’s nest that might have been fashionable if it resembled belly button lint just a little less.

When we practice looking deeply, we realize that our home is everywhere,” wrote Thich Nhat Hanh. “We have to be able to see that the trees are our home and the blue sky is our home. It looks like a difficult practice, but it’s really easy. You only need to stop being a wanderer in order to be at home. ‘Listen, listen. This wonderful sound brings me back to my true home.’ The voice of the Buddha, the sound of the bell, the sunshine, everything is calling us back to our true home. Once you are back in your true home, you’ll feel the peace and the joy you deserve.

Zen Buddhists extol a life of alert composure, of transparent presence in the here-and-now. This life they call “the true home.” It exists for each of us if we will only awaken to it.

A twelfth-century teacher of Ch’an—the Chinese precursor of Zen—named Yuan-Wu said: “It is like coming across a light in thick darkness; it is like receiving treasure in poverty…. You gain an illuminating insight into the very nature of things…. Here is shown bare the most beautiful landscape of your birthplace.

A heron swoops the water. A princely, primitive bird, each of its enormous slate-blue wings unfolds effortlessly as a chaise longue. The heron foot-drags the stream. Then it sails aloft and, turning, reveals the silhouette of a pteranodon. I like to divine the lasting essence of this place. I like to feel intimations of something akin to those tutelary spirits—near at hand, beyond spectrum of the visible—to whom Celts built menhirs and dolmens; spirits the pagan Romans called genii loci. Thracian shepherds would have known Duck Run inhabited by potamids, nymphs of rivers and streams. Shinto worshippers in Japan paid homage to divine spirits of leaves, to sacred life coursing through roots and bodies of trees, the kami spirits of wind and water. I like to feel what they felt. I like to hear what they heard: the land improvising always—in zephyr, in freshet—its oracular speech, its earth-jazz, its wild glossolalia.

As an American practicing within an Asian religion, both here and in the States, I try to stay vigilant concerning issues related to cultural appropriation—especially the purloining of spiritual traditions from foreign nations…Such issues have validity. So do issues relating to spiritual dilettantism, the shallow, selfish dabbling in religious beliefs and practices of other people.

Ya better stop boastin' 'bout bullshit that you can't even do. Come hell or high water, as long as I'm alive, I ain't gonna let you assholes ruin this street!

By the way, Kanji-san. I heard that Roppo-Ichiza doesn't have many members. If you'reup against a crowd, then you could've asked Sasaki-san and the others for help." "We'll be fine. Roppo-Ichiza's a lot stronger than you think. It's true that we've got fewer people than a team like Furin. But we make up for it with the best of the best!

It doesn't matter if we don't win. You've got the wrong idea." "Wrong idea?" Roppo-Ichiza's job is to ensure that people can entertain and be entertained without fear. As long as we can keep doin' that then winnin' or losin'... doesn't matter. Even if you beat all of us here, even if we end up flat on the ground, as long as the street and Shizuka is safe, then that's all that matters to us.

Do ya think we can do it? What if we screw up?" "You idiots. No one's perfect on their first try. Newbies are gonna make mistakes. That's normal.

Suo-san..." "Hm?" "What do I have to do to get a back as broad as theirs to shoulder as much as they do?" "I don't know much about Kanji-san. But those two must have overcome all kinds of painful experiences. That's why their backs can be so big they can be so strong.

Suo-san..." "Hmm?" "What do I have to do to get a back as broad as theirs to shoulder as much as they do?" "I don't know much about Kanji-san. But... those two must have overcome all kinds of painful experiences. That's why their backs can be so big... they can be so strong.

水 (4 strokes) meaning water radical 水 ON readings スイ SUI KUN readings みず mizu common words 香水 こうすい kōsui perfume

Compared to the kata for sword fighting or jūjutsu, karate kata are longer. They are a sequence of scenes designed like a little drama. A long karate kata can include more than 70 different actions. Sword fighting or jūjutsu kata, however, are only single attack or defense actions. They are not dynamic forms like karate kata but static models. In fact, for the two kata types even different kanji are used. This specific character of karate kata must be well understood. Karate was created and developed in the Tokugawa period and was not protected and promoted by the ruling system like sword fighting. Instead it was highly suppressed by the officials. The technical and the psychological and spiritual knowledge could not be put down in a sophisticated language as it could be done for sword fighting. In order to explain the techniques to the students by using kata, to demonstrate what was to be observed in particular and what was not done correctly, one needed rather long sequences of actions. The old masters could not describe the techniques with written words or pictures and had to express them in the kata. This needed a lot of time, brains and effort. Furthermore, the kata had to become a means to teach without words not only the technical aspects but also the psychological and spiritual abilities to turn the methods of killing into methods of saving lives.

I learned that each character can be broken into components: far left, top, middle, etc. These LEGO pieces, referred to as radicals, form the building blocks from which all kanji are made.

traditional weapons of the samurai Dim Mak Death Touch doku poison dōshin Edo-period police officers of samurai origin (low rank) endan ninja smoke bombs fugu blowfish or puffer fish Fuma Wind Demons gaijin foreigner, outsider (derogatory term) geisha a Japanese girl trained to entertain men with conversation, dance and song haiku Japanese short poem hamon artistic pattern created on a samurai sword blade during tempering process hashi chopsticks horagai conch-shell trumpet horoku a spherical bomb thrown by hand using a short rope itadakimasu let’s eat! kagemusha a Shadow Warrior kamikaze lit. ‘divine wind’, or ‘Wind of the Gods’ kanji Chinese characters that are used also by the Japanese katana long sword ki energy flow or life force (Chinese: chi) kiai literally ‘concentrated spirit’ – used in martial arts as a shout for focusing energy when executing a technique kimono traditional Japanese clothing kissaki tip of sword koban Japanese oval gold coin

Kuroha: "Personally think it's refreshing to have a book where the girl doesn't show her panties." Gin: What a horribly uncultured thing to say.

Gin: Kuroha, you totally overreacted. Eat some marshmallows and calm down.

Gin: Her chest pressed up against my elbow. Yup, still gloriously flat.

You don't watch anime?! Such a statement would be unbelievable, were it not the 21st century. Common sense in this era must have been completely different.

A pictograph of a Chinese drum and cymbal set , played at all the festivals, symbolized music and pleasure. The Chinese first simplified it to , then wrote the final form 楽, meaning music or pleasure. Used as a word by itself, generally meaning pleasure, it is pronounced TANOSHI-I. In compound words it is pronounced RAKU or GAKU. 音楽 ONGAKU, sound-music, means music. 気楽 KIRAKU, spirit-pleasure, means happy-go-lucky or carefree. A 楽器 GAKKI, music-utensil, is a musical instrument.

especializaciones, colores, tipos, grafías, «manierismos», de la forma en que la tradición literaria de Occidente los concibe. Solo así se podrá dar cuenta de la riqueza, de la virtud semántica, de la polivalencia de significados que late en los intersticios de las diecisiete sílabas que Matsuó Bashô y sus discípulos elevan a la categoría de gran arte. La lengua en que Bashô escribió se grafía como un sistema de escritura, compuesto de dos subsistemas. Para grafiar el japonés, necesario usar kanji, ideogramas de origen chino, más un silabario, el hirakaná. Sucede que el japonés es idioma aglutinante (como el tupi, las lenguas indígenas de América, el vasco, el turco, el finlandés, el húngaro) de mecanismo muy distinto del chino (monosilábico, como el tibetano, el vietnamita, el thai). El japonés tiene terminaciones, conjugaciones de verbo, sufijos: el núcleo de los sustantivos y verbos es dado en ideograma, kanji, las terminaciones morfológicas, en silabario. El japonés clásico es una lengua de frases interminables, a veces literalmente interminables, y, en ese caso, se dejan incompletas, en el vigésimo o cuadragésimo giro, como si sus — 136 — Leminski_vida_completo.indb 136 26/01/2015 21:18:31

This poster, which I still have on my wall 20 years later, contains all 1,945 of the jōyō kanji , the characters designated for basic literacy by the Japanese Ministry of Education. Most

which a drawing imported into a text document can no longer be altered, but must be changed in the original graphics program and reintroduced into the text document.) Out of the box the Star was multilingual, offering typefaces and keyboard configurations that could be implemented in the blink of an eye for writing in Russian, French, Spanish, and Swedish through the use of “virtual keyboards”—graphic representations of keyboards that appeared on screen to show the user where to find the unique characters in whatever language he or she was using. In 1982 an internal library of 6,000 Japanese kanji characters was added; eventually Star users were able to draft documents in almost every modern language, from Arabic and Bengali to Amharic and Cambodian. As the term implied, the user’s view of the screen resembled the surface of a desk. Thumbnail-sized icons representing documents were lined up on one side of the screen and those representing peripheral devices—printers, file servers, e-mail boxes—on the other. The display image could be infinitely personalized to be tidy or cluttered, obsessively organized or hopelessly confused, alphabetized or random, as dictated by the user’s personality and taste. The icons themselves had been painstakingly drafted and redrafted so they would be instantaneously recognized by the user as document pages (with a distinctive dog-eared upper right corner), file folders, in and out baskets, a clock, and a wastebasket. Thanks to the system’s object-oriented software, the Star’s user could launch any application simply by clicking on the pertinent icon; the machine automatically “knew” that a text document required it to launch a text editor or a drawing to launch a graphics program. No system has ever equaled the consistency of the Star’s set of generic commands, in which “move,” “copy,” and “delete” performed similar operations across the entire spectrum of software applications. The Star was the epitome of PARC’s user-friendly machine. No secretary had to learn about programming or code to use the machine, any more than she had to understand the servomechanism driving the dancing golf ball to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Changing a font, or a margin, or the space between typed lines in most cases required a keystroke or two or a couple of intuitive mouse clicks. The user understood what was happening entirely from watching the icons or documents move or change on the screen. This was no accident: “When everything in a computer system is visible on the screen,” wrote David Smith, a designer of the Star interface, “the display becomes reality. Objects and actions can be understood purely in terms of their effects on the display.

You shouldn't change. Keep being you. If a strong and smart guy like you never gives up, then just maybe you'll be able to accomplish a miracle like that one day.

沈黙( ちんもく) は金 ( きん) Silence is gold.

I dip the brush in ink. Making ink---grinding powders, mixing colors (golds, silver, azurite), and adding glue---can take hours. Someday, I might be able to do this. But it's a master's skill, and I am a novice. It is the way of kata, the practice of doing something over and over again until it is second nature. Calligraphy is part of the imperial identity. Therefore, it is part of mine now.

She takes up the brush, dips it, and, on the same piece of paper, executes the first stroke. "Do not think about the character you're making. Only think about the line, the single movement. It's like a dance, ne? If you concentrate too much on the final steps, you will miss the present ones." Another stroke, one more, and she has completed the pictograph. It is beautiful, worthy of being on a wall, and I say so. She shakes her head. "I still have much to learn, but it is passable. It doesn't have to be perfect, however. Kanji is an expression of the soul.

In the west, owls were often seen as a symbol of wisdom, but in Japan and China, they were considered wicked animals that would consume their own family or masters to grow stronger. It was such an ingrained idea that the kanji for “owl” (梟) could also be found in menacing compound kanji words. For example, the word for a person who rose to power through bloodshed was created by taking the word for “hero” (英, which means great. And 雄, which means strong. Together forming 英雄,) and replacing the “great” with “owl,” creating 梟雄. Or that was what my grandpa told me, at least. As I watched the clash between the two Gollems, I was strongly reminded of that little fact. Gien had betrayed his own homeland in his thirst for power, much like the owls of my homeland’s legend. Apparently, the compound kanji for a decapitated criminal’s head on display was made by adding the “owl” kanji to the front of the kanji for “neck” or “head” (首), creating 梟首. It was based on the idea of nailing the bird’s corpse to a tree, so all could see its crimes.

I had stayed closer to Japan than she had. I yearned for Japan, Japanese food, Japanese people; I loved the Japanese language and, more than anything, Japanese literature written with the three distinct systems of Japanese writing: graceful hiragana ひらがな, spartan katakana カタカナ, and dense kanji 漢字. Someday soon I was to return to Japan, to the country that held all things dear to me, and when I did, then at last I would awaken deep, slumbering yearnings and embark triumphantly and ecstatically on a new life—my real life. Yet that day never came, and I had ended up spending an unconscionable portion of my one-and-only life on foreign soil, far from where I was meant to be.

Old-fashioned study methods worked back then, so why can't it work now? Rereading, rewriting, and re-listening to the same vocabulary, sentences, dialogues, and short stories is enough to ace school exams via your short-term memory, but they are not very effective means to learn and retain new language or any kind of information in the long term. They are also tedious and not very fun ways to learn.

A major theme in Spirited Away is the young girl’s deconstruction into a type of positive schizophrenia that enables her personal development. The pivotal moment is when Yubaba changes Chihiro’s name; the consequence of this act only fully reveals itself to those who have some knowledge of Japanese. In the Japanese language, the first name and surname are made up of characters called kanji that have one meaning but have several pronunciations depending on whether they are used alone or with other words. In the case of “Chihiro,” the name is formed by the kanji “sen” (for “thousand”) and “jin” (meaning “search” or “question”).

By miracle I seem to have survived into this life of contentments, stripping away, giving up, letting go, while gaining immeasurably at every step. I’ve found a life spare in its delineations, yet rich in amplitude.

Sometimes I think of my death,’ wrote Kurosawa, ‘I think of ceasing to be... and it is from these thoughts that Ikiru came.’ The story of a man diagnosed with stomach cancer, Kurosawa’s film is a serious contemplation of the nature of existence and the question of how we find meaning in our lives. Opening with a shot of an x-ray, showing the main character’s stomach, Ikiru, tells the tale of a dedicated, downtrodden civil servant who, diagnosed with a fatal cancer, learns to change his dull, unfulfilled existence, and suddenly discovers a zest for life. Plunging first into self-pity, then a bout of hedonistic pleasure-seeking on the frentic streets of post-war Tokyo, Watanabe - the film’s hero, finally finds satisfaction through building a children’s playground. In this, the role of his career, Shimura plays Kanji Watanabe, a senior civil servant sunk in ossified routine - a man who, as the dispassionate narrator tells us, has lived like a corpse for twenty-five years. Confronted with the news that he has terminal cancer with only months to live, he finds himself driven to give some meaning to his life. This was one of Kurosawa’s own favourites among his films. It grew, he said, out of a sense of his own mortality. Although he was only 42 and had yet to make most of his finest films, he was tormented with doubts about what his own life would be worth, saying, ‘I keep feeling I have lived so little. My heart aches with this feeling.’ From this angle, the film can be seen as a form of therapy, Kurosawa reassuring himself, and us, that life *can* be made to have meaning, even under the shadow of imminent death. As the critic Richard Brown wrote, Ikiru ‘consists of a restrained affirmation within the context of a giant negation. What it says in starkly lucid terms is that ‘life’ is meaningless when all’s said and done; at the same time one man’s life can acquire meaning when he undertakes to perform some task which is meaningful *to him*. What everyone else thinks about that man’s life is utterly beside the point, even ludicrous. The meaning of his life is what he commits the meaning of his life to be. There is nothing else.

周りの人たちが私を見始めたので、自信が湧いてきて、さっと思いついた日本語を続け

News from Japan doesn’t travel and hardly ever gets reported abroad. It is almost as if Japan’s winds do not travel far.

You know, when people familiar with the mountains enter the wilds, they often look for a branch that stands out, break it to mark their tracks. It’s useful on the way back. It’s called a shiori, a folded branch, just like the word for bookmark. It is written differently but is pronounced the same.