Kanji Confusion

[Larry Lipps]

Guys, having recently purchased a Japanese flag, I've become interested in attempting to learn some of the characters to try and decipher some of the writing. In looking at Bortner's book on Japanese flags, I think I found the characters, but the flags in his book have the characters reversed from mine. I've posted a photo to show what I'm talking about. It's the same characters, but the order is reversed (no, I don't have the flag upside down). My question is which direstion is this normally read? I'll never understand this if I can't even understand which direction to read from.

[ZERO-sen]

yours read from left to right. The pic in the book reads from right to left. The slogan can be written from either way, even from top to down.........

[blinky]

Welcome to the wonderful world of kanji!

[Stu W]

Hi guys,

I'm new to kanji myself. I can understand having it written right to left as I've been told that is the way Japanese is normally written and read. I can also see it going vertically but not left to right. Wouldn't that be like writing sdrawkcab (backwards) in English? Any info would be helpful.

Regards,
Stu

[ZERO-sen]

Hi guys,

I'm new to kanji myself. I can understand having it written right to left as I've been told that is the way Japanese is normally written and read. I can also see it going vertically but not left to right. Wouldn't that be like writing sdrawkcab (backwards) in English? Any info would be helpful.

Regards,
Stu

when you write a sentence, do you start from the left and go to the right? if you are talking about backward,then letters of the flag in the book is written backward like the old days (old ways of writting slogans). English is made up letters spelled into words, that's hardly the case for Chinese characters (Kanji). each characters has its own meanings, so you can construct a sentence without making it look like this sdrawkcab.

[Larry Lipps]

I knew this was going to be tough, but WOW! Thanks for the information.

[zachb]

Something like this I suppose:

May your military fortunes be long lasting.
Long lasting may your fortunes in war be.

[Stu W]

Something like this I suppose:

May your military fortunes be long lasting.
Long lasting may your fortunes in war be.

Hi zachb and ZERO-sen

Thanks to you both for your assistance. It makes more sense to me now. I was thinking of kanji more in terms of letters making words and now see where I went wrong.

Kind regards,
Stu

[zachb]

Stu,

I'm really not that far ahead.

Believe it or not it was actually Richard Fuller's little book on Sake Cups, with its section on Kanji, that got my western mind to begin to understand (conceptually) what was going on with the Japanese language, i.e., radicals, forms, etc. But by no means would I even say I was familiar with the language. Several years ago I did find a pre-war military terms Japanese-English dictionary (surely they still come up on ebay). The dictionary has been most helpful but of course I usually need some context in order to find what I'm looking for. As much as we collectors need references on pistols, helmets, etc.... I still think someone needs to put a book together for "Pre-War Kanji for Dummies." Best Regards, Zach

[ZERO-sen]

Something like this I suppose:

May your military fortunes be long lasting.
Long lasting may your fortunes in war be.

it's more like this

Wish martial spirit last forever

forever last spirit martial wish

it's just written from the right to the left like the old days. the Slogan is the same......