Henry Li Carves Me Three Special-order Japanese Seals

I may or may not have mentioned my interest in Japanese stone seals. What these are are probably recognizable to you as that square red thing that appears on traditional Chinese paintings -- well, they of course also appear on Japanese ones.

They are the signature of the artist, usually containing the three or four syllables of their name, sometimes in a highly stylized cursive form of kanji (Chinese characters) that hails from the origins of kanji. They are extremely beautiful, and when I went to Japan this summer and stopped in at a printer's place near my hotel in Nara, I remarked upon these square, large stamps that were very different from the usual inkan that all Japanese carry; it's kind of like a permanent signature, usually their name in modern kanji in a self-inking stamp. People rarely have them custom-made -- a self-respecting shop will already have their name on an inkan, so they're cheap and convenient.


But I wanted the artist's version, which is always square or rectangular, as opposed to ordinary daily-use inkan, and usually must be special ordered. As you can imagine, these can set you back a pretty penny.

I thus decided I would order the materials and do them myself, not having a clue what I was getting myself into. I wanted to carve my son's name into a name seal (called rakkan) so he could stamp his Japanese calligraphy works with it instead of some cheap plastic round one.

I ordered the materials -- soapstone and carving tools -- and set to work, inspired by Henry Li's YouTube videos.

Henry works out of Southern California and does custom name seals as well as traditional Chinese calligraphy and paintings. He's an absolute genius at the carvings, which is evident from his videos.

So I, thinking it was going to be a breeze, tried to carve a seal according to Henry's videos.

It was an utter disaster. Henry makes it look like child's play -- child's play it is not.

Not even bothering to try a second one, I sent the stones and the designs to Henry to have him carve them for me. I sent three stones, only intending to have two done, but he gave me such a great price for all three that i could not resist. And then he made not one, but THREE videos for YouTube about my son's name seals.

Let me tell you, making videos as professional as Henry's is not for the novice. His videos look like they were filmed by a cinematographer on a film set, so you can imagine how blown away I was when he put them up on YouTube.

Here then, are the three videos Henry made. I strongly urge you to consider getting your own stone seal. Henry's talents would seem to command large sums of money, but they do not. They're incredibly reasonable.

Before you go contacting him, please tell him that Nick sent you, and he'll probably lop off a nice percentage for you. But just do it.

THANK YOU, HENRY!!!!!!! When I talk to Tai-chan in my video chat I will ask him to record his thanks. He's going to freak out when he gets these seals, as are his family and all his friends.

Why No New "Kanji a Day?"

I was supposed to be posting all the kanji I'm learning every day in this space. But you know what? I'm jumping around too much. I'm not doing them in a particular order, and so far, about 90% of them, I actually did study while I was in Japan, all those years ago.

I underestimate how many I studied; I must have gone through at least 500 while I was there, at least, recognition-wise. Now all that is required is to drum all these up from memory, and learn how to write them -- that I never learned to do -- just to read them -- and memorize all their readings.

But it's basically a job of catch-up. I know so many that fall outside the realm of "Year one," "Year Two," etc. that it's pointless learning them again in order.

Writing them has just become easier, thanks to a couple of iPad apps that I highly recommend, plus a stylus. I use JiShop for kanji recognition and a bit of handwriting; you can pen in a radical and it will automatically list all the kanji with that radical (but you have to be pretty precise with your penwork) -- and it will look those kanji up and give definitions, readings and compounds for them, plus break them down and give you three different examples of stroke order. Highly recommended. I think it's less than ten bucks, but worth ten times more.

Then there is Midori, which is a great app that also lets you write kanji, except it's even more picky than JiShop, so it really gets your stroke order in gear.

That's another thing I realize I took from my earlier Japanese kanji studies -- I must have learned how to use the correct stroke order, because to write a character like 口 requires you to throw away everything you've been taught about drawing things, because just this box has an odd stroke order (only three strokes makes the whole box) that just wouldn't occur to you if you weren't taught it. And that stroke order applies EVERY time you have to draw a box, which is OFTEN.

And I have to admit, writing kanji is half-writing, half-drawing, which is definitely an odd thing to do for us Westerners.

My stylus is a useless piece of shit -- a Wacom Bamboo -- but I suspect anything you get is going to be a pathetic stand-in either for a pen or a brush. Since then, I got a Trent Arcadia from Amazon, which has yet to arrive, but I suspect despite the good reviews it will be very similar to the Wacom.

Still, I'm plugging away -- since I wrote the last post on kanji I must have mastered at least 20 more kanji. So get to work, people, 'cause we're gonna have a test!

Okay, Maybe Japanese When I feel Like It

It takes a lot of energy to write in Japanese, even when all you're doing is typing on a keyboard. Still, you have to think about the grammar, what sounds natural, how would  a Japanese put it, yada yada, and after all Google Translate is really no help. It mangles some sentences so badly that even though I know my Japanese is correct, the translation machine just can't grasp it.

I guess with a language in which subjects are often optional, the computer just can't get the idea of "context" so when you just write something that's typically Japanese, without a subject, like "And often, my students . . ." -- of course, dropping the "my"because I don't need it, because YOU know I'm talking about MY students, as opposed to anybody else's . . . well, the computer doesn't know how to handle that. So it will put something it thinks is correct, like "our" or even "its" (it loves that one, because it gets the computer off so many hooks) which just make the resulting English translation a horror.

At any rate, the topic of this post is that I just watched a documentary, a really fantastic one, about the rather depressing subject of suicide in Japan, but one I think I will make required watching for some of my more advanced students, because it not only is mostly in English, with JAPANESE subtitles, which is a major switch, but because the vocabulary is quite down to earth and not very complicated. Plus, it's done in a typical conversational/polite style which is what we students of Japanese should all be learning, plus it has a lot of those conversational quirks that all languages have, like "y'know," "Ummm," "So then .  ." etc. etc. which are really the key to the back door of learning any language naturally, so this documentary is ideal.

I also found that, just by re-studying kanji as I've been doing in the last two months or so, my reading comprehension level has leaped to unimaginable heights -- sometimes I can read the ENTIRE set of subtitles on the screen, if they didn't go quite so fast.

And if I can do it so can you!

I will download this documentary and watch some bits of it with some of my more advanced students (you'll know who you are) and I think it will give you a lot more bang for your buck than some adolescent animé time-waster.

Okay, Bilingual, Then. じゃあ、バイリンガルだ

Kanji for today (if I have to do it, by gum, so will you)

今日の漢字（一生にがんばろうか？）

万
マン、バン
ばん
10,000

Examples:

三万五千円　（さんまんごせんえん）（san-man-go-sen yen)
35,000 yen (about USD $360.00)

万歳　（ばんざい）(banzai)
Hooray! (lit. 10,000 years)

Not to be confused with  五 （ゴ）(go - five) or 方 （カタ、ほう）(kata, hō - method, way) 

Japanese From Now On ・これから日本語

I've decided that it would be a good thing not only for me, but for you, as learners of Japanese, to write my future blog posts in Japanese. I'm not saying all of them will be in Japanese, but I'm going to try. That will severely test my skills, as written and read Japanese is not at the top of my skills level. But if you ever have any trouble understanding a post, you can always just copy the text and paste it into Google Translate.

Its translation engine is sorely lacking in many respects but you will be able to figure out 90% of what was said.

これから全部このブロッグのポストは日本語で書くつもりです。そのように、私の日本語は上達して、生徒さんたちの読み練習が同時にできます。

もちろん、全部のポストは日本語で書くつもりではないけど、やって見ようと思いました。私にとって、日本語を書くか読むのはそんなに上手じゃないから、早くできるかどうか見るでしょ。

それに、分からなかったら、Google Translate　に行けます。通訳としては、あんまりよくないけど、まあ、私たちの目的としては、じゅうぶんです。

Twenty Kanji in Two Weeks; Can I Do It?

I told you I learned the first 80 kanji as learned by first-year (6-year-old!!) students in Japan, and by "learning" I mean *most* of their readings (on-yomi and kun-yomi), their pronunciations, their various meanings, and the, the hardest part: how to write them.

Before I did this, I knew all of them just by looking at them -- I've known them now for almost 25 years, when I first actually set about studying them. But not how to write them all correctly, or all their readings.

The next batch, the second-year study for Japanese kids (seven years old!!) consists of 120 kanji.

These twenty that you see here are just the first 20 of them. Again, I know all of them simply by looking at them; at least, their meanings. I don't know most of their on-yomis (what they would be pronounced as in compounds, or multi-kanji words) but I basically know most of their usages and kun-yomis (Japanese readings).

And I can write maybe give of the simplest from memory.

So: two weeks from today. Can I do it? Could YOU do it? Let's find out.

Rakkan Seals Done Professionally

Well, I'm proud to say this will be only the second time or so that I have posted identical posts on both this blog and my personal blog.

The story is fairly long-winded: one day I was cruising YouTube as only I can do, using an Apple TV so it just appears on my TV screen instead of having to watch it all pinched on my laptop -- and I came across the fellow below. He is Henry Li, who makes a living in SoCal with his wife Victoria in a busy social world (whirl?) of Asian arts. He himself is an experienced painter, but what caught my attention was these "Seal stones" that I had come across while in Japan this summer. (Now this is a three-blog post!)


You can hear me babbling in the above video about how cool it would be to get a seal stone for my son Taishi, in order to make his "Shodo" calligraphy paintings that much more professional.

So when I got back to Montreal I started looking in to doing it myself -- the carving, that is -- and that's how I ran across Henry and his voluminous YouTube posts on various projects he's worked on (mine will be up there soon!)

I purchased the recommended equipment and then tried my hand at what Henry made look easy. It was a complete and utter failure. The clean lines that he was carving in his videos just came out as a bunch of scratches in my attempt.

I complained to Henry, and he admonished me that of course it wasn't easy -- in fact, it was one of the most difficult Asian art forms. Weeeeellll, THANKS A LOT, HENRY! was my thought when he told me that. But if you think about it, it isn't his fault that he makes it look so easy!

So I gathered up my supplies and basically said to Henry, "Okay, Big Guy, YOU do it." And that's exactly what he did, as you can see . . . I used the money I made teaching Japanese -- not much, but it adds up -- to scrape together enough for Henry not to do just one, but THREE completely different seals! And he gave me a phenomenal price -- at least saving me $75 minimum.

So that's my story. Of course, when he started them, Henry must have finished them in an hour or so, although my painful scratching must have taken an hour just by itself.

I'll let Henry tell you (and show you) the mess I made of my attempt in this video below, and I hope he'll soon be sending me a link to the video he made on MY stones.



I know Tai-chan is going to be blown away, because I certainly am!

The three stones Henry made

When I sent Henry the three stones I had (look at the box at lower left and right next to it) I also sent him a photo of Tai-chan, plus a calligraphy panel Tai-chan made last year. Well, after making the stamps, Henry arranged everything  artistically (see the stamps now on Tai-chan's panel!) and took this beautiful photo. What can I say? I'm blown away!