![A bottle of Yamato Shizuku (yamato shizuku
, Japan droplet) sake (name spelt out at top right), with a rebus [?]to
, which is read as yama (Shan
, mountain) (symbolized by the [?]) + to (to
) + shizuku (Na
, droplet) (symbolized by the ) yamatoshizukuSheng Sakenomoto Chun Mi .jpeg](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/%E3%82%84%E3%81%BE%E3%81%A8%E3%81%97%E3%81%9A%E3%81%8F%E7%94%9F%E9%85%9B%E7%B4%94%E7%B1%B3.jpeg/170px-%E3%82%84%E3%81%BE%E3%81%A8%E3%81%97%E3%81%9A%E3%81%8F%E7%94%9F%E9%85%9B%E7%B4%94%E7%B1%B3.jpeg)
A Japanese rebus monogram is a monogram in a particular style, which spells a name via a rebus, as a form of Japanese wordplay or visual pun. Today they are most often seen in corporate logos or product logos.
These symbols are particularly common for traditional food brands, notably soy sauce. [1] An example is the logo for Yamasa soy sauce, which is a ∧ with a サ under it. This is read as Yama for mountain (山) (symbolized by the ∧) + sa (サ).
The monogram is composed of two parts: one a Japanese character, most often kanji, but also katakana or hiragana; [lower-alpha 1] the other a simple symbol, such as a circle or square. The symbol is pronounced according to its name, and together (in either order, but generally symbol first) these form a Japanese name.
Japanese family names are generally two kanji characters, each usually of one or two morae – hence one or two hiragana or katakana if written that way – and thus can be represented as one symbol plus one kanji character, sometimes one hiragana or katakana. Only a few symbols are used, and thus only a few names can be written as a monogram this way.
A name may be represented by a symbol that does not correspond to it but is homophonous – further punning – which is aided by the large degree of homophony in Japanese. For example, kane (金, metal) in a name may be represented by the symbol ┐, though this actually corresponds to kane (矩, carpenter's square); or -en (園, ... garden) in a name may be represented by the symbol ○, though this actually corresponds to en (円, circle).
There are many variations on the basic design of rebus monograms – only one character from the name may be used, the pronunciation need not correspond to an actual name, other typographical symbols can be used (like 〆, shime), [2] two symbols (and no characters) may be used [2] – for example, Maruyama (円山) can be spelt as ○∧ – and unpronounceable or unpronounced symbols may also be incorporated decoratively.
For example, the Yamasa symbol was created as a modification of the boat emblem of the Kishū branch of the Tokugawa clan, which was composed as ∧ + キ, with the katakana character キ used for the ki in Kishū, and the ∧ being purely decorative. The Yamasa variant turned the キ character on its side and reinterpreted it as sa (サ); the resulting Yamasa reading does not correspond to an actual name (the family name is instead Hamaguchi), though it sounds like a family name and such a family name does exist (e.g., written in the form 山佐).
These readings are used for other symbols as well. Most commonly, a circled symbol is pronounced maru + (symbol reading), for "circle" (丸, maru); circling a symbol is common, dating to circular seals. A notable example is the tax inspection division (査察部, sasatsubu) of the National Tax Agency, which uses a circled sa (査) as their symbol. They are thus known colloquially as the Marusa, from maru + sa (〇査). This is notably present in the movie title A Taxing Woman (マルサの女, Marusa no onna). As katakana this would be written as ㋚; see Enclosed CJK Letters and Months for Unicode standard circled symbols.
Rarer variants exist, like Kikkou man (亀甲萬, tortoise-shell 10,000) for Kikkoman soy sauce (tortoises are said to live for 10,000 years), which uses a hexagon to symbolize a tortoise shell (亀甲), with man (萬, 10,000) inside.
Only a handful of symbols are commonly used, though some have different readings; these are: [2] [3]
| Symbol | Reading | Kanji | Description | Other character's position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 〇 | maru | 丸 | circle | inside the circle |
| 〇 | en | 円 | circle | |
| ∧ | yama | 山 | mountain | under the mountain |
| ┐ | kane | 矩 | carpenter's square | inside the angle |
| ┐ | kado | 角 | corner | |
| □ | kaku | 角 | box | inside the box |
| ♢ | hishi, bishi | 菱 | diamond, rhombus | inside the box |
There is no standard everyday Japanese term for rebus monograms. Rather, they are referred to by their use, such as "trade name" (商号, shōgō), [2] "store name" ( 屋号 , yagō ), [3] etc., or generically as "symbol" (標号, hyōgō), "symbol mark" (シンボルマーク, shimboru māku), [2] etc.
As designs and corporate symbols, rebus monograms date at least to the mid-17th century, and early on were featured on noren . They presumably come from the graphic tradition of the battlefield flags of the Warring States Period (Sengoku period, mid-15th to early 17th century), as seen in the simple clan name designs of Sashimono and Uma-jirushi. More broadly, these come from the same heraldic tradition as mon , where family emblems are pronounced according to the design, yielding the family name, as in Mitsu-ya ("three arrows"). While many mon feature kanji taken from the family name, the mon as a whole is not pronounceable as the full name.
During the Edo period, pictorial rebuses known as hanjimono (判じ物) were immensely popular, and involved similar wordplay; see Rebus#Japan. Today the most often seen of these pictorial symbols is a picture of a sickle, a circle, and the letter nu (ぬ), read as kama-wa-nu (鎌輪ぬ, sickle circle nu), interpreted as kamawanu (構わぬ), the old-fashioned form of kamawanai (構わない, "don't worry, doesn't matter"). This is known as the "kamawanu sign" (鎌輪奴文, kamawanu-mon), and dates to circa 1700, [4] being used in kabuki since circa 1815. [5] [6]
Furigana is a Japanese reading aid consisting of smaller kana printed either above or next to kanji or other characters to indicate their pronunciation. It is one type of ruby text. Furigana is also known as yomigana (読み仮名) and rubi in Japanese. In modern Japanese, it is usually used to gloss rare kanji, to clarify rare, nonstandard or ambiguous kanji readings, or in children's or learners' materials. Before the post-World War II script reforms, it was more widespread.
Hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana as well as kanji.
Katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script.
Kana are syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or magana, which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most prominent magana system being man'yōgana (万葉仮名); the two descendants of man'yōgana, (2) hiragana, and (3) katakana. There are also hentaigana, which are historical variants of the now-standard hiragana. In current usage, 'kana' can simply mean hiragana and katakana.
Maru may refer to:
A rebus is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+) and the letter "n". It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames.
Iteration marks are characters or punctuation marks that represent a duplicated character or word.
The dakuten, colloquially ten-ten, is a diacritic most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a syllable should be pronounced voiced, for instance, on sounds that have undergone rendaku.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.
Gyaru-moji or heta-moji is a style of obfuscated (cant) Japanese writing popular amongst urban Japanese youth. As the name gyaru-moji suggests, this writing system was created by and remains primarily employed by young women.
In modern Japanese, ateji principally refers to kanji used to phonetically represent native or borrowed words with less regard to the underlying meaning of the characters. This is similar to man'yōgana in Old Japanese. Conversely, ateji also refers to kanji used semantically without regard to the readings.
A is a Japanese kana that represents the mora consisting of single vowel. The hiragana character あ is based on the sōsho style of kanji 安, while the katakana ア is from the radical of kanji 阿. In the modern Japanese system of alphabetical order, it occupies the first position of the alphabet, before い. Additionally, it is the 36th letter in Iroha, after て, before さ. The Unicode for あ is U+3042, and the Unicode for ア is U+30A2.
Japanese input methods are used to input Japanese characters on a computer.
The chōonpu, also known as chōonkigō (長音記号), onbiki (音引き), bōbiki (棒引き), or Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark by the Unicode Consortium, is a Japanese symbol that indicates a chōon, or a long vowel of two morae in length. Its form is a horizontal or vertical line in the center of the text with the width of one kanji or kana character. It is written horizontally in horizontal text and vertically in vertical text. The chōonpu is usually used to indicate a long vowel sound in katakana writing, rarely in hiragana writing, and never in romanized Japanese. The chōonpu is a distinct mark from the dash, and in most Japanese typefaces it can easily be distinguished. In horizontal writing it is similar in appearance to, but should not be confused with, the kanji character 一 ("one").
JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standard developed in 1969, was the first Japanese electronic character set to become widely used. The character set was initially known as JIS C 6220 before the JIS category reform. Its two forms were a 7-bit encoding or an 8-bit encoding, although the 8-bit form was dominant until Unicode replaced it. The full name of this standard is 7-bit and 8-bit coded character sets for information interchange (7ビット及び8ビットの情報交換用符号化文字集合).
JIS X 0213 is a Japanese Industrial Standard defining coded character sets for encoding the characters used in Japan. This standard extends JIS X 0208. The first version was published in 2000 and revised in 2004 (JIS2004) and 2012. As well as adding a number of special characters, characters with diacritic marks, etc., it included an additional 3,625 kanji. The full name of the standard is 7-bit and 8-bit double byte coded extended KANJI sets for information interchange.
Nu, ぬ in hiragana, or ヌ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana each representing one mora. Both hiragana and katakana are made in two strokes and represent. They are both derived from the Chinese character 奴. In the Ainu language, katakana ヌ can be written as small ㇴ to represent a final n, and is interchangeable with the standard katakana ン.
Wi is an obsolete Japanese kana. The combination of a W-column kana letter with ゐ゙ in hiragana was introduced to represent [vi] in the 19th century and 20th century. It is presumed that 'ゐ' represented, and that 'ゐ' and 'い' represented distinct pronunciations before merging to sometime between the Kamakura and Taishō periods. Along with the kana for we, this kana was deemed obsolete in Japanese with the orthographic reforms of 1946, to be replaced by 'い/イ' in all contexts. It is now rare in everyday usage; in onomatopoeia and foreign words, the katakana form 'ウィ' (U-[small-i]) is preferred.
Yamasa Corporation is a Japanese corporation founded in 1645 whose primary field of business is the manufacturing of soy sauce and various seasonings. It was incorporated in November 1928. With its head office located in Choshi, Chiba, it runs two factories in Chiba, and a third located in Salem, Oregon, United States., where subsidiary Yamasa Corporation USA is headed.
Wu is a hentaigana, a variant kana or Japanese syllable.