Five Must-Knows When Getting a Kanji Tattoo

Japanese tattoos are cool. But if a personal translator is out of your league how can you avoid becoming a kanji fashion victim and get stuck with a tattoo you will really regret?

1. Know the difference hiragana, katakana and kanji

Before you talk to your tattoo artist, make sure you know what you are talking about. You say you want a Japanese tattoo, but what do you know about Japanese characters? You need a quick stint in 2-minute Japanese boot camp.

First off, lets be clear that there is no Japanese alphabet. There are three sets of Japanese characters hiragana, katakana and kanji and each group has its own history, function and style. Get your head around these facts and you will already know more than 99% of the people walking around with Japanese tattoos right now:

Hiragana These simple, rounded characters represent sounds, but have no independent meaning. They were developed by women in the Heian period and are still considered feminine by Japanese people.

Katakana Developed by Buddhist monks around the same time as hiragana, these are simple, angular characters that also represent sounds and have no meaning of their own. You saw them cascading down the screen in Matrix (although they were backwards!)

Kanji Originally from China, these characters are like pictures, representing a meaning and also several different sounds depending on the situation.

Just reading this has probably given you an idea of which style you might like for your tattoo but dont stop just yet! Now you know what kinds of Japanese characters there are, lets move on to

2. Writing styles

Come a bit closer. Lean forward towards the screen. Thats right. Now, look at the words in front of you. Take a good, close look at the shapes of these letters. OK? Now tell me honestly: Would you want a tattoo in Times New Roman? How about Tahoma? Whats that? You dont want a tattoo by Canon or Epson? Sure you dont. And in the same way, you dont want to have your Japanese tattoo looking like a printout either!

So, now we move on to writing styles. Just like there are three kinds of Japanese characters, there are also three ways they can be written. Dont worry. This is easy! I know, you are thinking that you cant even read Japanese, so how on earth will you be able to recognize these different styles? Well, try this:

Kaisho Block letters. You learned to write your ABCs like this, and Japanese kids learn to write their characters in just the same way: Like a Volvo boxy but good.

Gyousho Cursive letters. You moved up to middle school and learned you could write faster by letting the parts of some letters flow into the next. Yes, you guessed it - the Japanese do the same thing, and they call it gyousho.

Sousho Super-cursive letters. Ever seen a prescription from a doctor? Then you know what sousho is like in Japanese: Sure, the writer or some other trained person can (probably) read it, but no one else has a clue what it says!

Are you getting the picture? If you want to look like a computer printout, then be my guest and go for the kaisho style. Thats your choice. But I think you probably want to use either gyousho or sousho for your tattoo. My personal preference would be gyousho: Its stylish, but it wont leave even native speakers baffled.

3. Real or fake?

Remember I mentioned Mel C at the beginning? Well guess what kanji she got tattooed on her arm? Thats right Girl Power: Great in English, but show this kanji combination to most Japanese people and youll get a blank look at best. Want a worse example? Try big daddy. Now, you know what it means in English, but put it into kanji and you end up with large father! It just doesnt work.

Im sure you remember that kanji are the only characters that have meaning as well as sound. And their beauty means that they are what most people want for their tattoos. But watch out: As well as being popular, they can also be the most dangerous!

Lets see if we can find a pattern here: Look carefully at the examples above. What are they communicating - concrete concepts or abstract ideas? Can you see the difficulty the translators had? The kanji for dragon, samurai, love or any other concrete ideas are pretty easy to discover. But go for anything with an idiomatic meaning and whoever is trying to help you translate it is going to get a major headache!

Just an idea, but how about this suggestion: Rather than trying to force a round English peg into a square Japanese hole, why not find a real Japanese phrase that you like and get that instead? Bushidou (the Way of the Warrior) and Ninjutsu (The Art of Stealth) are two good examples of real Japanese terms that would make great tattoos.

4. Your name in Japanese

As Im sure you remember from 2-minute Japanese boot camp, katakana are the characters usually used to write foreign words and names. So, if you want to get a tattoo of your name, technically these would be the characters you would choose. But I am guessing that, like most people, you want your name written in kanji.

Do a quick search on Google and you can find a number of sites that specialize in translating names into kanji. Basically there are two different methods that these sites use, so lets look at them here.

Translating the meaning

This method involves finding out the original meaning of the English name, and then researching the kanji equivalent.

For example, my name has its origins in Greek and means crowned one. The one who is crowned is the king, so I could translate my name into the kanji for king and call myself ohsama. (Perhaps a little pretentious and disturbingly similar to Mr. Bin Ladens first name!)

Translating the sound

This is a lot more difficult! Flick through a dictionary and you will find a bunch of kanji that can be combined to sound like your name. But sound isnt everything: Remember that kanji have meaning as well. In fact, it is even more complex than this! Be sure to check each of the following factors with anyone who translates your name like using this method:

1. Sound Does it sound like your name or not? I have seen my name translated on certain websites to sound like Stefan. Shame my name (Stephen) is actually said the same as Steven!

2. On-yomi and kun-yomi Yes, more technical words! But dont panic they are easy to understand: Basically, kanji have two kinds of reading. One kind, on-yomi, is their original Chinese sound. The other, kun-yomi, is their Japanese-only sound. What to watch is that (like oil and water) on-yomi and kun-yomi dont mix. Use either all on-yomi reading or all kun-yomi readings to make the sound of your name.

3. Meaning Do the kanji have a good meaning together? Now, it can be very difficult to find kanji that sound right and have a good meaning, so you may need to compromise a little on one of these.

4. Masculine or feminine I guess this is more like a sub-category of meaning, but it is something you need to check out to avoid embarrassment. For example, while Asian Beauty may be a great combination for a woman, I get the feeling most men would not be too happy about having that permanently written into their skin!

5. If in doubt, check!

First, use your new-found knowledge of Japanese to ask a few difficult questions to your tattoo artist or kanji specialist. If you get the feeling they dont know what they are talking about, you probably want to look elsewhere.

Next, before you get anything permanent done, use an online dictionary to check whether the Japanese really means what you want it to. You may not be able to input Japanese yourself, but you can copy and paste characters from an email or web page and see what they mean.

Finally, if you are lucky enough to know any, ask a Japanese person what they think. Their confused expression may tell you that you have come up with another big daddy!

Follow this advice and you will avoid the most dangerous pitfalls of Japanese tattoos and get a kanji tattoo you can be proud of.

About the Author

Stephen Munday lives in Japan and is currently starting his own online business testing Adsense Decoded techniques on his new site SleepDeeper.org

This article is (c) Stephen Munday 2005. Permission is given to reproduce this article in whole with the URLs correctly hyperlinked.

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