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It's not all administrative whining here at No-sword
This piece of calligraphy was on display at a restaurant I had dinner at the other day in transit:
The basic message is, "Dear [restaurant named] Marufuku (丸福). I, [the talent named] KAYAMA Yuuzou (加山雄三), wish you all the best (祝, upper right)."
The specifics of the good will are:
春夏冬
二升五合
Now, the visual effect of a bunch of Chinese characters with no kana is classy, suggesting a quotation from, well, the classics. These characters, however, add up only to nonsense: "Spring, summer, winter / Two masu, five gou" (masu and gou are units of measurement).
If you're in on the joke, though, you read it like this:
あきない
ますますはんじょう
akinai
masumasu hanjou
Which has the following meanings and implications:
- Akinai can mean "no (nai) Autumn (aki)", i.e. the missing element in "Spring, Summer, Winter", but it also means "trade, business" (from the verb 商う, akinau, "to do business").
- masumasu, i.e. "two masu", is an adverb meaning "more and more"
- hanjou is, I think, an iffy rendakued word meaning "half a shou" -- a shou being a unit of measurement equal to
fiveten gou (half of which is five gou, 五合). But another word with the same pronunciation is 繁盛, meaning "prosperity".
So, painful to interpret though it be, it comes down to "may your business prosper more and more".
I don't even know what an equivalent to this would be in English -- maybe fake Latin ("HIC RESTAVRANTO REGNET"), or using Cyrillic characters for appearance rather than sound?
Final note: these puns are so common they verge on boilerplate, as you'll see if you Google them.
Anonymous:
This post had me barking, but what do I know? All kindling astride, this is a ril, ril good post.
(the above, mostly stolen from a book cover I own, seems to be kind of similar in some conceptual ways, except it isn't exactly boilerplate English...)