Learning Japanese: Word/World Power

The day did not start out well. I had gone to the bookstore to pick up my Hanko - my official Japanese name stamp. I need it to verify all official documents and I have to have it in order to set up a bank account. My Hanko looked cool - a neat and slender black lacquer stamp. I also bought the mandatory red ink pad - in a small black case - I had a little black drawstring bag to carry them. I went to my office and tried out my new Hanko - marking a page with neat red squares containing my name in Katakana script.

Katakana is one of 3 Japanese scripts - it is used exclusively to spell out foreign words. Kanji is their highest order script - it's a system of pictorial ideograms used to symbolise words and concepts, you need to know at least 4,000 of these symbols to make sense of a Japanese newspaper. A basic Japanese education involves learning 20,000 Kanji. Hiragana is the Japanese script that is used to modify Kanji in various ways - it is syllabic - more like our idea of an alphabet.

I slowly worked out what the Katakana symbols of my Hanko spelt: o - ton -ru: it dawned on me that my lovely O'Donnell surname had been rendered -o-ton-ru. I was surprised how disappointed I was. Jonathan Swift knew about Japan (largely from enjoying the outrageous travel writings of a bogus fraud) and I suspect he had a good swipe at the Kanji system in Gulliver's Travels - where fellows carry ever-expanding loads of symbols that they pull out from backpacks in order to make themselves understood. It's always a bad day for me when I feel an affinity with Swift. I could feel a curious indignant pitch rise in me - call it tribal - I wished I had let whoever had done this know that they might have forgotten Katakana and given me Kanji symbols - O'Donnell is from Domhan Ail - picture World Power please.