Yamato sank and her giant body lies shattered 200 miles northwest of Tokunoshima. 430 meters down.
Three thousand corpses, still entombed today.
What were their thoughts as they died?

In April 1945, Yoshida Mitsuru was a junior officer stationed on the bridge of the Yamato during her ill-concieved and hopeless 特攻 Special Attack mission that was meant to draw off American aircraft from the attack on Okinawa to allow a better hope of success for the 神風 Kamikaze aircraft attacking the American fleet. But as the Japanese themselves demonstrated in their 1941 attack on the HMS Prince of Wales, a battleship without aircover was no match for a concerted attack by over 400 aircraft. The Aircraft carrier group was the new supreme force on the high seas.

Richard H. Minear’s translation of Mitsuru’s account is a very easy and interesting read. The style is very clipped and terse. The original was written entirely in katakana in a now seldom used style called bungotai 文語体. First written in 1946, It fell foul of the military censor on several occasions during the American occupation. Only in 1952 was a version published, and the original didn’t appear until 1981.

It is patriotic and unashamedly militaristic in terms of sacrifice and duty, yet it is oddly matter of fact and I wouldn’t say it glorifies war. If it were an American writing about America’s military history no-one would find it strange at all. The British envisioned a similar forlorn hope and would have committed it’s fleet to engage a German invasion at all costs. Had that happened the sacrifice would have been deemed heroic.

Regardless of nationalistic sentiments, this speaks of the waste of war, the expenditure of young lives dutifully following orders of old men who wouldn’t bear the consequences. The sailors knew what they were doing. They also knew they couldn’t protest, that should have happened in the thirties with the rise of militarism not in 1945 when it was all falling down around them.

I heartily recommend this book for an insight into the thoughts of the Japanese who pointlessly sacrificed themselves in huge numbers in the closing year of the Pacific War. Not for it’s war story but for the glimpses of universal human life, in the bride left behind, the old sailor who posted all his possessions home before the attack, the captain knowing details about a junior officer, the crew getting slightly drunk together the night before the attack, it could have been almost any navy at any time.

Related posts:

1. Hiroshima – melted people
2. Hiroshima Day
3. Falling Blossom

I found a very interesting book in a second hand bookshop at the weekend. (I buy almost any book about Japan! even the ones written in Japanese I can’t read that appear in this shop from time to time)
It reminded me of the old curse “may you live in interesting times”.

It is about the love affair between an British Army Officer (Arthur Hart-Synott) from Ireland and a Japanese woman (Suzuki Masa-san) in the early days of the 20th century. It is based on his letters that were found in Japan when Masa-san’s daughter-in-law was clearing the house. A unique record I think. Unfortunately Masa-san’s side of the correspondence is lost but it is a very interesting, albeit sad, story indeed.

Hart was posted to Tokyo in 1906 to learn Japanese and fell in love with Masa-san. But due to the nature of class and racial prejudices of the day and family pressures and global turmoils they were somewhat doomed to a tragic ending.

The backdrop is the decline of the British Empire and the rise of Japan. The Boer War, The Japanese-Russian War, The War of Independence and Anglo-Irish War in Ireland and 2 World Wars. Interesting times indeed and I wouldn’t want to experience them.

Not so long ago either. It’s my Grandparents time. I have an autograph album of my great aunt’s that has drawings by army officers from 1914. I remember family photographs of relatives in uniform from that time. And some Japonisme ornaments we had. Even some of the places in the book are familiar. One street mentioned is adjacent to where I live in London.

Hart is not entirely sympathetic from his letters. I found his lack of concern for his children very selfish, but maybe it was a very different time. In the end I don’t think he treated Masa-san very well. It could be his limited Japanese didn’t allow much nuance (and I’m reading translated extracts) but he often sounds like a petulant teen.

It think it is a pity we only hear Masa-san in the reflection of Harts letters. I’t be very interesting to know what her concerns and day to day life were. And in the end I perhaps think it might be the opposite of the sub title; it seems more a Japanese Woman’s enduring love for a British Officer.

—
The books title is never explained but I wonder if it isn’t to do with the following phrases I found to do with falling blossom 落花 [らっか]
落花流水 [らっかりゅうすい] (n) mutual love,
落花枝に帰らず破鏡再び照らさず (exp) fallen blossom doesn’t return to the branch, what’s done is done.

It is available from Amazon.

Related posts:

1. Haiku
2. The Teahouse Fire
3. Requiem for Battleship Yamato

漢字練習ノート・小学２年生　author: 下村昇 published by: 偕成社

Inspired by the upcoming Kanken test in June I went looking for some Kanji texts in JP Books yesterday. This workbook is one of the two books I bought. It is a companion volume to a more comprehensive yet small book 漢字の本2年生

As I wanted to use it more for revision I decided to skip the main book and just use the workbook. Also the main text being entirely in Japanese (as is the workbook by the way) needed more concentration than I really wanted to give to it. However I think once you reach a certain level it’s very useful and satisfying to work in an all Japanese environment.

This book is one of a series of six aimed at Japanese primary school students; one for each grade. there is a slight overlap with JLPT kanji. Grade 1 covers a lot of the JLPT4 kanji, with Grade 2 you’ll cover most of the JLPT3 kanji, and Grade 3 goes beyond JLPT3.
This book covers the 160 Grade 2 kanji. Each kanji takes a quarter of a two page spread. Each entry has four sections.

• A breakdown of the kanji. onyomi, kunyomi, stoke count, radical, category.
• How to write the kanji. Stroke order, notes on the type of strokes, kanji broken down into components.
• Kanji Etymology. Diagrams showing how the kanji evolved. The pictorial meaning.
• Fill in the blanks. Practice using the kanji in sentences.

The kanji are presented in order of categories, people, animals, plants, house etc. These are very useful at this stage but as the ideas get more abstract at higher grades I suspect many will fall into the その他　everything else category. Stroke count and radical are needed to use dictionaries properly. They are tested in the Kanken test.

The way the kanji are broken down is quite interesting. You could use the instructions to verbally describe to a Japanese person how to write it, in much the same way as in English you’d tell someone how to spell a word.

The etymology helps you understand the kanji. If you can understand it you are more likely to remember it and recognise components in more complex kanji.

Fill in the blanks is useful in giving you example sentences but you don’t even have to guess what you have to write. A longer test page would be more useful.

I think this is a good little book. It only costs 500 yen. I think you could use it as a starting point in learning kanji, before using more comprehensive books aimed at adult second language learners such as JLPT3 Kanji by Examples or Basic Kanji Book vol 1 and 2.

Related posts:

1. 漢字学習ステップ８級 • Kanji Study Step Level 8
2. JLPT 3 Grammar Exercises
3. Japanese Childrens Kanji Book

Hiroshima by: John Hershey pub: Penguin

In January I visited Hiroshima. I’m not sure I wanted to. I was going there on a recommendation of a friend to see bugaku at Miyajima shrine near Hiroshima. I was afraid Hiroshima would be too depressing; maybe upsetting; maybe just too macabre to be a tourist at the worlds first nuclear destruction.

In the event, what I found was a vibrant modern city not overly dominated by it’s past. Yes there are memorials, and a museum, but oddly I didn’t find it depressing as I expected. It’s strange knowing what happened, seeing what survived. There’s the famous A-Bomb dome. The bank, and in the grounds of Hiroshima castle, trees.

And people survived.

Hiroshima is a contemporary account written by an American journalist of six of these peoples stories. I’m not sure what Japanese contemporary accounts exist. I do know the SCAP censored all mention of the bomb by the Japanese. Even in a memorial to schoolchildren killed by the bomb, the coded reference E=MC2 had to be used instead. Also Hershey’s article was the first to put a human face to what happened. Previously articles about the bomb concentrated on its abstract destructive power and America’s triumph.

Originally written as a groundbreaking single article for the New Yorker in 1946, it was updated in 1986 to see what had become of the people in the book. A German Jesuit priest. A Japanese Reverend. A Japanese office lady. Two Japanese doctors. A Japanese Housewife.

The things that struck me about the accounts in the book were

• the sense of resignation. しかたがない。
• the apparent silence of those dying in the ruins of Hiroshima.
• the sense of adventure felt by the children.
• the crassness of “re-uniting” a victim with the co-pilot of the Enola Gay on This Is Your Life.
• the abandonment of the survivors to their fates
• the endurance of the human spirit

It’s a thin volume and well worth a read.

I know when I was at school history studies were very Euro-centric. The Pacific theatre in World War 2 was summed up as Pearl Harbour ’41, British POWs and Hiroshima ’45. Nothing about Manchuria, China, Midway, Firebombings, Okinawa, Occupation.
In the eighties, the accounts of nuclear war tended to be fictional what-ifs. What if a bomb dropped on America, the UK? But strangely the true bombing and it’s effects were ignored. I can’t remember much about it in mainstream media until the 60th anniversary.

Indeed at the start of the HBO documentary White Light Black Rain, Japanese teenagers are vox-popped in Shinjuku about what happened on August 6, 1945. And although I suspect a film-maker’s manipulation at work, none of them knew, nor even guessed, it might have had anything to do with the war.

In that film I saw the melted people of my title. A man whose flesh was quite literally melted onto his bones. You could see holes on his chest between his ribs. Apparently his heart is visible through these. A woman whose fingers cannot be straightened, whose face is a reconstruction. Yet whose spirit is miraculously intact. People whose friends and families disappeared in an instant. A woman who survived with her sister, only to see that sister commit suicide by jumping in front of a train because she couldn’t go on. Ordinary people used as guinea pigs in studying the effects of nuclear weapons.

And I also saw the dehumanising effects on the people who make and drop bombs. An inability to empathise with the potential victims. Or maybe an unwillingness, if you did empathise could you do it.? In the end maybe everyone takes refuge in the mantra “only obeying orders”.

It’s important to known about these things. Then there might be some possibility of them not being repeated, again, and again, in smaller or larger conflicts.

Further Reading
Atomic Bomb Museum dot org
Hiroshima Peace Museum
Japan Focus
Hibakusha
Dissent

Related posts:

1. Hiroshima Day
2. Upcoming films at ICA London
3. Social Histories of Japan 1 – Confessions of a Yakuza

The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery published by Vintage Originals

This is a very interesting debut novel by Ellis Avery. What struck me most about it is the author had obviously learnt Japanese and learnt it in some depth. Usually in novels about Japan there are a few tidbits thrown to the reader about Japanese but I often get the feeling that it is so superficial, that the author just did a little bit of research for added flavour. Ms. Avery shows some deeper insight or at least I can identify with her characters struggles in learning Japanese and learning to write.

By the time I was thirteen, in the second year of Meiji, I had a grasp of spoken Japanese that mirrored, I think, the way Yukako read and wrote: multiple strands of information spun towards us and we knotted together a meaning using what we knew and what we expected to hear. I understood what was said to me because it was said to me, and in due course I had heard many times over the few hundred things anyone—Yukako and little Zoji excepted—ever said to me. I could only understand what people said to each other if I listened very carefully; I could say much less than I could understand.

I recognise this in my own efforts. When being spoken to I can pick up the meanings, most other Japanese is background noise. I have to listen very carefully to follow it. Maybe I’m only prepared to listen to information I find important though and it’s very easy to let everything else wash over you.

Another passage slightly further along says something very apt about how kanji work. I always wonder if Japanese see the same blocks of meaning in kanji as I do or do they just see the word and it’s pronunciation?

Taking in pictures kana and kanji, Yukako came away with a story because she expected a story. She could read a sentence aloud and explain it in detail, but if I pointed to a kanji, she became flustered and irritable; she couldn’t tell me what it meant on it’s own, even though she had just used it in context to explain the sentence. She understood far more kanji than she could write….

…An ordinary speaker of English knows what a conversation is, a literate person can spell the word, an educated person will know it comes from Latin through French, and a specialist will know that con means with and verse means turn. A poet will hear conversation as a turning together. All the layers are there in English too.

I presume the author learnt Japanese because of her interest in Chado（茶道 tea ceremony) and her interest in Chado led her to write this novel.

It is set in the late 1800s after Japan was forced open by the Black Ships. The Meiji period must have been one of great turmoil as Japan went from a feudal agrarian society to a less feudal, industrial society. The character of Yukako in the book was based on a real person, and presumably the major events recounted are accurate too. Sen Yukako was responsible for the tea ceremony becoming part of the curriculum in the new girls schools. In doing so she changed what was once an all male art into one that might now be more identified with women. (Although from what little I know the master practitioners are men).

In essence the story is of a young French-American girl who is stranded in Japan after a fire and gets adopted into the household of a Tea Master. It is about her love for the daughter of the house, how she fits into Japanese society, and about the many social changes undergoing Japan in the Meiji period.

The narrator of the story is a young girl brought to Japan by missionaries when Japan is opened up. In some ways this is the most unconvincing part of the book. It requires a hefty suspension of disbelief. But it is necessary to have this western voice tell the story so you can appreciate what is happening in Japan. A Japanese voice wouldn’t have been as convincing or interesting I think.

Much is made, it seems, of the sexuality of the main character. Oddly I found it to be central to her character but peripheral to the story. (or is that the other way around?) I myself see the love as one of yearning for a mother or a sister and then that being transformed into something more sexual. I also don’t feel you really learn anything about sexuality in Japan of the Meiji period. Certainly Japan didn’t have Christian guilt about sex. That started to come in around this time to appease the colonial powers in order to show Japan as a modern nation and so re-negotiate the uneven treaties. But definitely you learn about the role of women within the society. Not so good, but if you think about it it wasn’t that good in Europe and America for women at the time either. Indeed there may have been more power and freedom for women in Japan.

The other interesting strand in the book is something that has always bothered me about depictions of Japanese samurai culture. In a feudal system the comfort of those at the top and their ability to indulge in (when you get down to it) rather pointless art is based on the toil and misery of the lower strata of society. And Japanese society was completely rigid for 200 years after the “reforms” at the beginning of the Edo period. The book doesn’t quite explore this theme, as you can see the author loves Chado, but there is a sense of unease there.

I also feel after reading the book that it’s almost like the middle book in a trilogy. The first chapters that aren’t set in Japan and the last chapters you feel could have been fleshed out into books in their own right. Indeed I’d really like to see the later chapters as a book on their own. I really want to know more about Inko, she is a character I’d feel great affection for.

I recommend this book. It’s well written. Although it is fiction the author comes across as knowing what she writes about. As well she should do having studied Chado for 5 years including spending time in Kyoto.

Related posts:

1. Photographs of Old Japan
2. Social Histories of Japan 2 – Autobiography of a Geisha
3. Social Histories of Japan 1 – Confessions of a Yakuza

Autobiography of a Geisha by Sayo Masuda pub: Vintage

Second in my short series about social histories of Japan.

Usually when you think of geisha you have an image of elegance in Kyoto. And geisha are adamant about how their function is not about sex. This woman’s life was very different. She was an onsen geisha and it was almost all about sex, albeit that her art put her a step above the common prostitutes. Her life was also one of slavery in all but name.

Unable to go to school, unable to read, I had grown up as an abandoned dog does; and then at the age of twelve, I was sold.

The second half of the memoir recounts her life after the war and black marketering and how she had to go into prostitution to pay for her half brothers treatment for TB. A sad life.
If you’ve read Arthur Golden’s novel or Geisha of Gion the autobiography of a high class Kyoto Geiko, or Lisa Dalby’s anthropological adventure, you should read this to get a fuller picture of what was probably the majority of geisha’s lives before the war. Of course the geisha in Kyoto and Tokyo would look down their noses at the common geisha and not consider them true geisha at all. However that is what Sayo Masuda was; a Geisha.

As with so many things in Japan, to the outsider there are many layers and subtleties to negotiate. Only those within the society really know and they feel no great need to satisfy outsiders curiosity.
It will make you think again if you catch a rare glimpse of a Geiko or Maiko in Kyoto.

It is remarkable that she wrote the whole book in hiragana. She was able to write but had no education so was illiterate in that she couldn’t write kanji. I’d like to try to read the original someday.

She is still alive I believe and has the much better life everyone deserves.

Also available at Amazon. You can read an extract on Random Houses web site.

–update 28May09–
Doug at Japan: Life and Religion has a nice (and probably more readable!) review.

Related posts:

1. Social Histories of Japan 1 – Confessions of a Yakuza
2. Photographs of Old Japan
3. Premiere Japan ’07

Confessions of a Yakuza by Dr Junichi Saga pub: Kodansha International Press

History books are so often about generals and leaders and battles and wars. The majority of histories of Japan seem to be about either World War 2 (variously known as The Pacific War, The Showa War, or The War against Japan. ) or the Tokugawa Samurai period.

These are neither. They are about relatively ordinary or even marginalised people from the first half of the 20th century, Late Meiji, Taisho and Showa periods. They are also first hand accounts of these peoples lives. It would appear that in Japan the good old days were niether all that good nor all that long ago.

There are 4 books I want to blog about.
The first is “Confessions of a Yakuza”.

The slightly lurid title is for the western market. The original title is 「浅草博徒一代」 and it was first published as “The Gamblers Tale” in English.

It was written by a country doctor from stories told to him by a patient. It is the first person reminiscences of a Yakuza’s life from the 1910′s until 1954. Interesting times indeed, several major events are referred to; the Great Kansai earthquake, The Bombing of Tokyo, The American Occupation, as well as some large events just mentioned in passing like sinking of the Toya Maru in Hokkaido.

Ichiji Eiji had an eventful life. He killed a man. He spent time in prison on more than 2 occasions. He was head of a gang. He cut two of his fingers off as a sort of debt of honour over a woman.
I’m sure a lot was left out of his stories. I can’t really believe it was all so peaceful and only about gambling. But perhaps it was only in later years that violent excess happened.

I once saw two Yakuza in a sentou in Kagoshima. The older had a full body tattoo; the younger obviously just starting out only had his arms tattooed. I think they had all their fingers. The older one was certainly macho. Jogging on the spot in front of the heater in the sauna. The mobile phones they left lying in the dressing room were certainly safe, who would steal a yakuza’s keitai? They didn’t seem the type of people you could test your Japanese on however.
And even Dr. Saga didn’t feel he could ask to take a photo of Mr. Eiji’s tattoos.

Two stories stand out. The first is an eye-watering kill-or-cure treatment for syphilis. No anti-biotics or anaesthesia here. The other is a second hand account of how the naval stores in Tsuchiura were looted to bare earth between the time of the surrender and before the occupation. I think it would make an excellent film, except I doubt a Japanese company would want to make it.

It is available on Amazon

Related posts:

1. Social Histories of Japan 2 – Autobiography of a Geisha
2. Hiroshima – melted people
3. Photographs of Old Japan

In the basement of Mitsukoshi Department Store on Lower Regent Street is JP Books which is probably the biggest Japanese bookstore in London if not the UK or possibly Europe!

It has Manga, DVDs, CDs, Japanese children’s and adult’s books, and most importantly Japanese as a second language textbooks. The store has had a small redesign lately and I notice it now stocks Japanese electronic dictionaries. The only place I know of in the UK you can buy them. They certainly have a good stock of items and they will order books for you from Japan.

I’m sure all the language books I write about on this site are available here.

Unfortunately they are expensive for Japanese books. Books sourced in the UK are of a standard price but books from Japan are priced using a formula of 100 円 equals £1. And the manga seem even more expensive with a 600 円 manga costing £7.50. The only competitor I know of charges similar prices.

I don’t really understand the practice. I can often order books from Amazon.jp more cheaply even when paying for an express air service is taken into account. JP Books does have higher costs than a bookstore in Japan and those books have to get here somehow but I would expect them to use sea freight for everything except magazines. Adanami Shobo must have similar overheads when they ship their books (albeit remaindered) from Japan but in no way is this reflected in their prices. Even if you were to consider fluctuating exchange rates, things would be really bad if currency would fluctuate 50% in a year, and I’d guess accounts are settled quarterly. Oh well you pays your money and takes your choice.

The big plus of going to a bookstore rather than a web site is that you can browse. (except manga; they’re sealed just like in Japan.) The staff are generally friendly and helpful and will speak to you in Japanese. As I had no idea about indexing in kanji someone helped me find a novel I wanted for a friend. As I had the title written in kanji I think they assumed I had a better Japanese ability than I actually have!

Lastly they have a loyalty scheme where you get a stamp for every £4 spent and after 30 stamps you get a £10 gift voucher. It has been the only loyalty scheme I’ve ever gotten anything with. (I might buy too many books!)

And reading the Mitsukoshi site, it seems you can get a further 10% discount if you apply for a Mitsukoshi membership card (it’s not a credit card). I have yet to do this but will investigate next time I am in Mitsukoshi.

Related posts:

1. アダナミ書房 – Adanami Shobo
2. Yotsuba＆! • よつばと！
3. JLPT past exam papers

Remembering the Kanji 1 James W. Heisig. pub: University of Hawaii Press

Heisig is the Marmite (or Natto) of Kanji learning. It’s mostly a love it or hate it affair. It also seems to have cultish tones with talk of unbelievers and converts amongst its fans. 溜め息

But because it has so much written about it I decided to give it a try.

Firstly lets be clear what this book promises and doesn’t promise.

The aim of the course is to put an English keyword with a kanji in your memory and give you the ability to write that kanji from memory. It does this with 2042 kanji which is more or less the amount of individual kanji a Japanese student leaves school knowing. It’s a course not on remembering the kanji so much as not forgetting them.

The specific aim is to give you the use of 2000 kanji in a manner similar to having the use of 26 letters of the roman alphabet. This would make it easier to add to your Japanese knowledge because you would be more able to read authentic texts and quickly assimilate new kanji words.

I think ideally you would do this course before knowing any Japanese. This apparently is how Heisig developed the course. In fact after trying Heisig for a few days the less you know about kanji the better.
However I think it’s unlikely for any student to do it this way. Once you decide to learn Japanese it’s unlikely you would delay it for the amount of time needed to learn the kanji. If you were even aware that the system existed.
The time taken is going to vary. But instead of years it is possible to do this in months or indeed weeks if you can do it full time. It seems reasonable to manage 20 new kanji per day, although from what I’ve read people tend to slow down a bit the further they progress.

OK what does Heisig not do?

It does not teach you the Japanese readings
neither On nor Kun. (in book 1) Indeed apart from the kanji themselves there is no Japanese whatsoever in this book. No kana either.
It does not teach compounds.
What you learn are individual kanji and the components that make up those kanji.

How does it achieve it’s goals?

1. It breaks the kanji down in to a systematic order based on their components.
If you examine kanji you will notice there are elements that re-occur. So very simple elements combine to form slightly more complex kanji and those kanji combine to make ever more complex kanji. By being systematic in the order of learning kanji every new kanji uses the knowledge of previously learnt kanji.
Almost as a side benefit of this you learn similar shaped kanji at the same time which makes it easier to remember them and distinguish between them.

2. In perhaps the most debated part of the system. Heisig uses “stories” to place the kanji in your memory. There is nothing new in mnemonics but many people see it as an unnecessary learning overhead.
However Heisig has a very good point here. The usual method of remembering kanji relies on our visual memory, which for most people isn’t very good. Therefore we forget a kanji rather quickly even after an initial success. By remembering a story instead the student uses a different sort of memory and so can recall a kanji accurately and consistently. I found I was doing this myself before I came across Heisig. The 3 women in 姦　easily reminding me of noisy. (surprisingly my Japanese friends didn’t know that the kanji for かしましい　was 姦しい、as that particular kanji has many negative meanings when in compounds. but I digress…) The shape of 臭い　reminds me of the Stinky Head Cheese Man in a children’s book. I also tended to break down kanji into components I recognised. for instance 語　being 言、五、and 口. Heisig is just being more systematic in using how we remember stuff like this.

3. Lastly the method of practising is by going from English keyword to kanji. In effect remembering how to draw the kanji. This is a little more difficult than reading but much more useful as once you can remember to produce the opposite more passive skill of reading is a cinch.

Why do people dislike it so much?

Indeed, it’s only a book. But like many things those that like it rave about it and those that dislike it tend to hate it.

However I have misgivings.
The total separation of Japanese readings until you’ve mastered writing and understanding an English meaning bothers me a bit. Indeed there seems to be an insistence that it might impeed your successful completion of Heisig. It’s unrealistic to expect that Japanese won’t be attached to a kanji.

The reliance on English keywords rather than concepts also bothers me. Everything I’ve read seems to suggest that you shouldn’t use your first language as a middleman to the second language, that you should combine the foreign word and the concept, not foreign word, english word, concept.
But this is difficult and I’m willing to let it slide.

Heisigs “stories” often annoy the hell out of me, especially the religious overtones. (His writing does as well, I find him dismissive and condescending at times) But I’m free to make up my own mnemonics and hopefully now I’ve seen his big idea I can get past his personality coming through the writing. In fact it’s better to make up your own mnemonics as you’ll remember them better.

There seem to be a lot of “lies to children”, over simplifications, disregard for more conventional aspects of kanji. He also doesn’t really explain the concepts underlying his method nor point out his divergence from the more accepted meanings of the kanji and components. It’s very much a case of “trust in my greater wisdom, grasshopper.”
For now I take a deep breath and remember it’s been done for a specific purpose.

The order seems a bit strange if you know any kanji.
Early on 吾 is introduced as I. Which it is but it’s a bit rare I think and 私　is the most common, probably followed by 俺、僕、and 我. The reason why 吾　is introduced is that it is made of the smaller components 五 and 口.
This seems to often be the case. You are not learning kanji that are immediately useful to you. (In fact you aren’t really learning kanji you are remembering them.)
But as there is a purpose behind it all I let this one slide as well.

While he has an odd insistence on knowing the traditional stroke order and stroke count, the rules governing this are never fully explained that I can see.

I get the feeling that I’ll have to unlearn some of the “lies to children” further down the road.

So Snake oil or Solution?
Probably neither, maybe both. I can see benefits in the system and benefits to the order and groupings of kanji.
If I stick it out I could be in a stronger position. I’ll still have a lot of work to do to actually read Japanese properly and leverage the knowledge into speaking better however. Let’s say it’s a partial solution to my particular problem of wanting to read Japanese. In a similar way to knowing the alphabet won’t actually allow me to read (phonics anyone?) I think that finishing Heisig is but a step on a far longer journey. It isn’t the panacea that some would suggest.

However after trying it for a while I’m finding it quite annoying with a whiff of snakeoil about it. The core ideas are reasonably sound, I’m not sure I like the implementation in the book however. The more I do the more I feel I’ll have to unlearn. Nor does it seem that useful until you can finish it and start the task of knowing how to read them properly in Japanese.

The book is useless as a reference.

The fact that the last text is a strange Latin quote, kind of sums it up for me. Does Heisig actually like and teach this language?

I’ll try to keep an open mind and give it a go.
But you know, I don’t really like Marmite…

十人十色　I suppose.

In the meantime if you’re curious the first part of the book is available here.
An interesting essay about Heisigs methods is here.
And this is a very good web site to help you using Heisig.

More traditional approaches are JLPT3 Kanji by Examples and Basic Kanji series
Better headwords are in the Kodansha Kanji Learners Dictionary
Let’s Learn Kanji has a lot of detail of how kanji work.
And more accurate etymology in Henshall’s Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters and the Kanji Networks web site.

Related posts:

1. Adventures in Heisig • week 2
2. Heisig revisited
3. Adventures in Heisig • day 3

よつばと！ 著:あずまきよひこ

More “Feel Good”-ness from しあわせ！

Yotsubato is a manga from the creator of my favorite anime “Azumanga Daioh“, Kiyohiko Azuma. It is about the day to day existence of a pre-schooler living in Japan with her adoptive father. (Yotsuba may not be Japanese herself). The manga’s subtitle is “Enjoy Everything”; which Yotsuba-chan surely does as only a five year old can. And so the look of delight on her face as she laughs ははは！never fails to cheer me up.

There are 7 volumes available. (I got mine while in Japan and via Amazon.jp In London you can get them at JP Books in Mitsukoshi.) Yotsuba always speaks in kana, sometimes mispronouncing words too. The adults speak in Kanji, but it all has furigana so it’s good for learners. The artwork is very clean and detailed line drawing that gives a good sense of Japanese life. — check out 第9話 「よつばと復讐」[Yotsuba and revenge] here.

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3. Japanese Childrens Kanji Book