The Lobster Dance

As a long-time student of Japanese, kanji have always been one of my weak points. There are just so many of them! Recently, I’ve started studying all the Heisig kanji via an online flash-card maker, and I have to say, I’ve fallen in love with kanji.

Especially the ones I’ll likely never use.

It’d be different if I were a student of Japanese history or a non-contemporary poetry translator, but the fact of the matter is that I need to be able to read a request for my participation in an event more than I need to be able to read The Tale of Genji. On the other hand, I’ve always loved poetry and poetic words and phrases, so thinking about the meaning and the radicals of these lovely kanji gives me the same thrill I got reading old Greek plays in high school.

I have a number of current favorite “not so useful” kanji. There’s 琳 (rin), which is probably the least useful kanji I’ve encountered, but one that I find astoundingly lovely. The first radical is for treasure and the second is tree. Together, it means jewel, or the tinkling of jewels. This kanji is used in a word for Taoist temple, but I prefer my image of tinkling jewels.

亮月
The first character (ryou, or akira) is sometimes used in names, but combined with the character for moon (月) to make 亮月 (ryougetsu), it means bright moonlight. ステキ!

榊
I like the word for sacred Shinto tree (a type of evergreen sacred to Shinto, apparently) because it’s so straightforward. The radical for tree, then the radical for god. Unfortunately, I mess up the pronunciation (sakaki) a lot, because it sounds like masaki 柾, the Japanese spindle tree. I actually have no idea what either look like.

蝦
One of the sort of useful kanji that I like is the one for shrimp. Usually, the names of fish are written in kana because most of them are “fish radical + other radical,” and looking at a traditional restaurant’s wall of fish kanji makes me want to cry. Actually, the standard word for shrimp is 海老 (ebi), which is a combination of sea and old (maybe because a shrimp looks like an old man?). But the word ebi has its own kanji–蝦, which I like because of my silly mnemonic. The first radical is insect and the second is the second part of 暇, or free (time), leisure. I like to think of our shrimp as a leisurely bug, meandering around the sea. It may be because I’ve been making up silly mnemonics about kanji for a month, but that one just cracks me up.

So will I ever use these? I don’t know, but I’m fascinated with beautiful kanji. Most of the ones I know are just too practical to capture my imagination, I guess.