Photos from No-sword. Professional or serious amateur photographers should probably steer clear; the only camera I own is the one embedded in my cell phone, and the last time I tried to compose a photograph I blacked out for three hours and woke up in an ice-filled bathtub with RULE OF THIRDS scrawled on the mirror in Aculux.

Cha Cha Club is a tea ceremony school teaching the almost-500-year-old Urasenke tradition with a "lesson style updated for the Heisei period" (平成版お稽古スタイル). For example, their FAQ sez:

Q: Do I have to wear a kimono?

A: No, of course not. Western clothes and even jeans are okay. However, on more formal occasions, jeans and other casual clothing are frowned upon.

Q: I don't think I can handle all that kneeling...

A: You can relax into a more casual posture if you like. [...] But you'll be surprised at how quickly you get used to kneeling as you practise.

Q: Aren't there lots of strict rules and things?

A: There is a "flow", but you'll pick it up naturally as you practise.

Ex-Urasenke director and current Right Angle chair 説田弘 (SETSUDA Hiroshi?) explains:

Things that Japanese people have valued for centuries are today being gradually lost. To ensure that the "Japanese soul" (和の心) is passed on to the next generation as it must be, those of us entrusted with transmitting it must conceive of new ways of doing so, appropriate to the modern age [...]

The question of whether you can jettison certain inconvenient and old-fashioned parts of a tradition and still call it the same tradition is somewhat philosopher's axe-y; I have never formally studied any beverage ceremonies of any kind, so I won't get into it here. It is interesting that they have two kinds of trial lessons, one for people who just want to experience an hour of pouring, rotating and sipping, and one that is "a trifle strict?" and includes, for example, guidance in how to sit when accepting the cup.

At Seibu, they believe that marriage is marriage even if it's between a rabbit and a snowman (-woman?):

"In winter, you need clothes most of all." (But if you are made of snow, you can apparently get away with just a scarf.)

Sharp-eyed, Japanese-speaking, anti-kanji readers (and I know I have surprisingly many) might already be flexing their commenting fingers, ready to observe that the ichiban ("number one", "most") is written in hiragana (いちばん), not kanji (一番). Doesn't this indicate dramatic attrition already? Losing the character 一 would be an alarming precedent for other, more complicated characters, which is to say every single one of them. But the answer is: eh, not really.

Many if not most style manuals actually insist on hiragana when you use ichiban as an adverb as opposed to a literal "#1". Not because 一番 is especially difficult or burdensome to write or read -- just because separating function word-y usages from content word-y ones is supposed to make Japanese easier to read and especially to scan. (Even Wikipedia agrees.)

On the other hand, I believe that these same style guides would also recommend that いる (iru, "need") be written 要る. So why isn't it? My guess is: it wouldn't be as cute. (The いちばん also probably has a lot to do with cuteness, to be honest; the fact that it coincides with widely recommended usage may be nothing more than a happy coincidence.)

Ichi is a teahouse in Kyoto's Kamishichiken, and this is their maiko blog. (No Japanese? No problem! Someone's translating it on LiveJournal.)

Grab a notepad and start scrawling 薔薇s and 鬱s quick, because kanji are about to disappear!

So many Japanese are forgetting how to write kanji characters that cultural experts believe the country may eventually scrap the use of Chinese pictograms in favour of the 46 simplified hiragana characters.

Software maker Kanken DS has released a title that enables people to test their knowledge of characters - but was surprised to find that 90 per cent of the 400 people aged between 35 and 40 who took part in a study were unable to recall all the correct number and positioning of strokes for the 1,945 characters that are taught in public schools.

Language Log's coverage is typically excellent, but I will note the following:

• The software maker is actually Rocket Company. Kanken DS is the name of the software, and I note without (explicit) comment that it is officially endorsed by the Nihon Kanji Nōryoku Kentei Kyōkai, i.e. the very same Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation that is quoted at the end of the story in the SCMP.
• What seems to be Rocket Company's press release about the survey does not mention any actual testing. The questions are more along the lines of "Do you think your kanji skills have weakened in the past few years?" and "Do you have less occasion to write kanji than you used to?" and "Do you think that the kids today, they don't learn kanji properly, the way you did when you were their age? If yes, do you also find that they should get off your lawn and/or put a sock in that damn rocks-and-rolls 'music', if you can even call it that?" (I may have embellished that last one.)
• There are also questions the results of which suggest strongly if oddly that Japan's population consider Tamori and KIKUKAWA Rei the King and Queen of kanji, and would like to be apprenticed to them in some bizarre nationwide educational compact.

So, let's not give this survey more credence than it deserves, which is, "As much as any other opinion poll conducted on behalf of organizations with directly related products and services to sell."

Of course, it makes perfect sense that as the need to actually write kanji diminishes, people's ability to write them will go down too. But down to zero the idea that kanji could go the way of hanja in Korea? An astonishingly intensified attrition, within five years to a decade? Kanji dying out "very soon"? (See comments) That's either doom-saying, wishful thinking, or straight-up non-sense. Sure, they'll probably continue to get gradually rarer in written documents (you know -- priceless cultural artifacts like shopping lists and post-it notes on computer screens saying "12:30 Tanaka-san called")... but why would people stop using them in electronic documents when the UI itself is a willing scribe?

If you combine handwriting and electronic entry, people's ability to produce kanji one way or another is probably going through the roof -- and isn't that exactly the kind of thing humans invented computers for in the first place?

Via Making Light: how to use a furoshiki. Yes -- now, thanks to the internet, anyone can master the mysterious and arcane Japanese art of wrapping things in a big square of cloth. Welcome to the age of miracles.

... Ber-ser-ker!

By the 1960s, the dual historical blows of Meij modernization and post-war pseudoamericanization had already sealed the kimono scene's doom, but it wasn't going out quietly. For example, the mook these images are from, Wafuku to yosooi ("Japanese clothing and dress"), includes recommended kimono styles for everything from weddings (sure) to travel (why not?) to PTA meetings (your child would refuse to attend school ever again if you tried that today). On the other hand, with hindsight, you can see how a lot of the innovations it showcases were really desperate, last-minute bids for modern relevance.

For example, this kufū ("contrivance") kimono, which uses loops and cords to ensure that even those unpracticed in the art of wrapping cloth artfully around their torsos can attend PTA meetings without worrying about the dreaded kikuzure, a delightful word describing the coming loose and slippage of one's clothing, making you look anything from "sloppy" to "like a salacious courtesan in a risqué period movie", depending on the exact degree of kuzure.*

Bonus trivia: those little loops are called chi (乳), "nipples", which means that the text accompanying this picture just went on and on about attaching rows of nipples to the inside of your collar, etc.

Or there's this marvellous invention:

On the right, we see the standard kimono. It just hangs down like a curtain! You'll never make it big in Hollywood looking like that. On the left, the solution: the fitted kimono! Follows your hips down and in, but is carefully designed so that your legs won't come out the front when you walk.

Unless you actually take normal-sized human steps, of course. But why would you? What are you, some sort of athlete-hussy?

Finally, the problem of breasts. Kimono weren't designed to exhibit breasts, nor did the evolve in that direction. Breasts ruin the line of the kimono and must be restrained and hidden with racy underthings like these:

Clockwise from the top middle, we have:

• A stern "brasierre" foreshadowing Madonna by decades;
• "Pads" of various shapes, designed for exactly the opposite purpose of their modern counterparts: you place them artfully around the breasts to smooth out your chest's contours and make your breasts less obvious;
• A sarashi, a strip of cloth you wrap around your chest to hold things down and in place, especially when you are pretending to be male; and
• A pair of "panties", which have nothing to do with breasts but which I include because (a) they're in the picture, and (b) the accompanying text notes that they are so loosely hemmed that you can go to the bathroom without taking them off, apparently solving the major objection to Western underwear as underkimono garments.

(Those underpants are actually no laughing matter. I once heard that early feminists in Japan spent a not insignificant amount of effort trying to get their more traditional sisters to wear them, because some women at the time would, if they were going commando, actually die in burning buildings rather than jump down and risk baring too much when their kimono flew up.)

Bonus picture: "Japanese-style lingerie": a stylish white juban.

This is so unremarkable that I'm not even sure why they bothered to put it in, but dig those tabi.

But today, as a result of globalization and rapidly changing demographics, the kimono business has collapsed, its future in question. Sales are expected to sink to an all-time low this year, even as Japan has emerged from recession to experience its longest economic boom since World War II.

The kimono's big problem is that it is in a downward spiral. The less it is worn, the more unusual it is to wear it; the more unusual it is to wear it, the less appealing it is as a wardrobe choice (except for situations where it is specifically required or accepted as a standard option). It also doesn't help that as sales volume goes down, prices go up.

(Kimono do have a reputation for being objectively more difficult and inconvenient to wear, but this is just a side effect of having being edged out into the formalwear ghetto. As everyday clothing, without all the optional extras, kimono are no harder to put on than a shirt and a pair of pants. Even tying your own obi isn't any more difficult than tying your own necktie, if you stick to the simple knots (in both cases). But kimono aren't everyday clothing any more, so most people only experience the heavy, complicated, formal version.)

You might draw an interesting analogy with (Western) art music: once upon a time, it encompassed everything from gigantic multi-movement works to throwaway diversions and settings of folk songs. The only competition was folk music itself. But when pop music came along, it took over the "everyday" niche, and only the greatest achievements of the art music tradition remained in the general cultural consciousness: symphonies, requiems, the "Moonlight" Sonata. Unfortunately, the loss of the simpler everyday stuff (along with the decline in actually performing music rather than just listening to it) meant that people stopped learning how to appreciate the more challenging and rewarding works -- they can't survive on their own, and that's why they're gradually fading away.

(Edited for sobriety.)

Like Mark, I find myself profoundly inspired by this year's kanji of the year, viz, 命 (mei, myō, inochi, mikoto, etc.: "life", "order", "target", "highness", etc.). The runners-up are also disappointing: 悠 ("think", "far") because it's in the name of the prince who was born this year; 核 ("nucleus") and 北 ("north") because you-know-who successfully detonated a you-know-what; the everstales like 新 ("new") and 心 ("heart", "soul")... No sign of the playfulness that got 萌 ("moe") into the running last year.

Probably the most interesting way 命 can be used is to write mikoto, which is the "highness" (as in "your") that I mentioned above. "Highness" is, obviously, a gross translation that takes the cultural context out back and breaks its kneecaps; the word mikoto is from /mi/ (honorific) + /koto/ ("word") and was first used to refer respectfully to what gods and emperors said, or did, or were -- the distinction was not always clear-cut, as is often the case with gods and emperors*. In any case, that is why everyone who's anyone in Japanese mythology has a name ending in -no-Mikoto.

Nothing to do with mikado (as in "The") by the way; that's an entirely different circumlocution from /mi/ (honorific) + /kado/ ("gate"). Oh, I guess they share the same honorific.

The Tale of the Nine Mutes

There were two lonely mutes. One was named Pitcher, and the other was named Catcher. Instead of words, they threw a ball back and forth between them to learn how they felt about each other. When their feelings were mutual, the ball went straight from one to the other, but when they were at cross purposes, the ball flew wide. Before long, a man who was jealous of the two mutes appeared. Wanting somehow to tear them apart, he took a club of oak called a bat and smashed the ball of their conversation into the world outside the two of them.

Having lost their ball, the two mutes were at a loss. The man who had hit the ball with the club spread his arms wide like a demon and ran around the two of them. Each time he went around, a number was recorded, and the rising numbers symbolized their unhappiness. Just then, seven other mutes gathered around, determined to return the ball to the first two. They had come from "the land where the sun shines" to kill the man with the bat, and for some reason, their left hands were unusually large.

Left hand: not more than 30.5 cm lengthwise, 20.3 cm from inside base of thumb to outside base of little finger (palm width), 11.4 cm (tip)/8.9 cm (base) between index finger and thumb.

Anyway, this story is so long that even I don't know what happened after that. But I hear that in the morning, mutes will come from all over the world to gather in the square and discuss how to continue the tale. Me, though, I've gone and learned to talk, and that means I can never go back among them.

Mind is a Japanese programming language in the sense that you write code for it in Japanese. For example, it looks like the Mind "Hello world" program would be:

メインとは
　　「こんにちは、世界!」を　表示し
　　改行すること。

Wikipedia's entry for Mind notes that it is based on Forth, a stack-oriented programming language (summary: "1 2 + 3 *" instead of "(1 + 2) * 3"). Which makes sense, because as I suppose virtually all of my readers know, you can think of the Japanese language in a similar way: as a sentence progresses, the "stack" fills up with topics, adverbs, etc., until the verb at the end ties them all together and finishes the statement. (Obviously, real Japanese as she is spoke isn't always this neat and tidy, brains don't comprehend language like computers parse it, etc., but you get the idea.)

Nadeshiko is another Japanese programming language, a less interesting scripting one with (Windows) GUI functionality, in Japanese. It's based on an older one called Himawari, and you can find lots of related links where you might expect.

This is probably as good a place as any to note that around these parts "C++" is affectionately abbreviated to Shii pura [pura].

Found online: "Tororin Mura no Torori"'s giant collection of information and images relating to kayōkyoku, early "idol" music, and pop in general.

The video captures are pretty sweet, but the EP collection is amazing. Even if you don't speak Japanese, you can enjoy it, because every single link in the left-hand column of each subpage leads to a decent-quality scan of the cover.

Hippies and such! HIRAYAMA Miki's "Noa no hakobune" ("Noah's Ark")... Tsunagi and Midori's "Ai no banka" ("Love elegy")... NAKAYAMA Chinatsu's "Anata no kokoro ni" ("To your heart")... URABE Masami's "Sukoshi tōde o shite mimasen ka" ("Won't you come far away with me?")...

Ladies with soul and/or sass! WADA Akiko's "Doshaburi no ame no naka de" ("In the pelting rain")... SHURI Eiko's "Shiroi kobato" ("White baby dove")... SONO Mari's "Joōbachi" ("Queen bee")... NAKASHIMA Mayuko's "Yume de ii kara" ("I don't care if it's a dream")... OKUMURA Chiyo's "Gomen ne... Jirō" ("Sorry, Jirō")... the Pinky Chicks' "Yopparatta ojōsan" ("Drunk princess")... NATSUME Masako's "Oh! Cookie face!"... Chiko and the Beagles' "Asobitsukareta kaerimichi" ("Tired out and going home")...

Duos! The Pink Pickles' "Boku ni sawarasete okure" ("Let me touch (it|you)")... Chewing Gum's "Gorira no uta" ("Ode to the gorilla")... AZUSA Michiyo's "Konnichi wa akachan" ("Good day, baby")... Kako and Miki's "Reiji nijuppun hatsu yakō ressha" ("0:20 night train")...

Girls wanna kokuhaku them, guys wanna be them! Jackey KICHIKAWA and the Blue Comets' "Aoi hitomi" ("Blue eyes"), "Izuko e" ("Where to?"), and "Kitaguni no futari" ("Two people (from|in) the north country")... HIRAO Masaaki's "Miyo-chan"... HONDA Yasuaki's "☆ BOY"... and last but definitely not least, SAKAI "Bow-tie" Masaaki's "Machi no akari" ("City lights")...

... and that barely scratches the surface.

(I'm so, so sorry.)

hakoiri musume is an old Japanese phrase that literally translates to "daughter in a box." It is a metaphor for a daughter brought up with extreme care, with positive/negative implications varying by speaker and era as you might expect.

Since it's such a vivid visual metaphor, it remains a very popular gag caption for photos of daughters, girls in general (musume can also just mean "girl" or "young women"), and especially pets, in cardboard boxes.

It's also the name for a family of Japanese sliding-block puzzles, popular since at least Edo times, where the object is to manoeuvre a gigantic and awkward "daughter" piece past her relatively dimunitive yet closely packed family and servants to freedom. Representative applet.

I note in passing the mysterious and wonderful poetry of "Royal Out Game" as an English name for this puzzle, although I'm sure that there was an isometrically equivalent European version with its own lineage and backstory as well.

New book by concept artist duo HARA Rintarō and HARA Yū, 匂いをかがれる かぐや姫 ~日本昔話 Remix~ ("Scent-smelling Princess Kaguya: Japanese folk tale remix") is, as far as I can tell, a straight application to Japanese folk tales of that old web favorite, machine-translating something from language X to language Y and then back to X again for humorous effect.

The title, for example, comes about because the kaguya in "Princess Kaguya" is that special variety of machine translation kryptonite, a proper noun that defies meaningful analysis under the living language's rules. (Though its likely meaning of "shining [in the?] [night?]" is not hard to see given that morphemes like kagayak- (shine) and ya (night) survive in MJ.) On the other hand, it is quite susceptible to meaningless analysis, as kagu (smell [transitive]) + ya (as soon as).

So, kaguya hime returned from its round trip as 匂いをかがれるとすぐに, プリンセス (which is awkward due to Japanese being right in the middle of reorganizing its passive form, but could theoretically be interpreted as "as soon as her scent was smelled, a princess" or "as soon as she smelled [honorific] a scent, a princess"; the translation offered by the authors is "as soon as it smelled, princess").

"Momotarō" ("Peach Tarō", "Peach Boy"), came back relatively unharmed as "Momotaro", but its famous onomatopoeic opening was not so fortunate:

A certain day, when the old woman washed on the river, one very big peach with boss Buracocco, boss Buraco flowed from an upper reaches of the river. "Oh dear, a savory peach. Let's make it the old man's souvenir." The old woman scooped the peach coming drifting and came back to the smile Family.

Yes: the aged and much beloved mimetic phrase used to describe the peach's journey down the river donburakokko donburako has become the sinister duo Don Buracocco and Don Buraco.

More at the Haras' homepage. Paper which mentions them in passing.