Hi Chance,
Those are good questions and thanks for your participation! I’ll reply with an answer but in the mean time PM me and tell me what kind of kanji you want and what you want it to say. I’ll start working on it.
tattootranslation@gmail.com
i have a question ,
what do japanese people really honestly think of brits , yanks , ozzies , ( anyone not japanese ) using kanji in there tattoo designs ? 😀
oh and , can all names be translated into kanji even if it is an arabic name ?
(thats just something i want to know because of my son’s name )
Hi Butterfly_Kisses,
Japanese people with tattoos and Japanese tattoo artists think non-Japanese with tattoos are great. They’re generally warmly welcomed…all things (i.e. you’re not sitting next to a racist Yakuza that hates all things Western) considered. The use of kanji, however, in Japanese tattoos tends to be very frugal. See Master Roppongi Horiyu’s tattoos at: http://www.tattootroll.org/ second from the bottom and the two Yamaguchi Yakuza syndicate fellows he inked – no kanji. Just images.
Mainstream Japanese, however, will very seldom meet or have anything to do with a tattooed foreigner so it’s not something they’d give much thought to as either good or bad, but rather think of it as something quirky, odd or unusual. It just depends the kind of Japanese person you’re talking to. Unlike other countries, tattoos in Japan are generally hidden (unless it’s inked somewhere that can be seen) from public view and only shown to one’s closest friends and family. A good way to guess who’s Yakuza on the trains is to notice the folks that are buttoned up tight, long-sleeved with no skin showing in the dead of summer, with temperatures and humidity in the 90s.
Yes, you can translate any name from any language into kanji but in some cases it might end up being a false substitute i.e. the characters would sound like the given name but they would not match the meaning of that name. To get around this most foreign names are written using the katakana syllabary which are simple phonetic sounds (and historically component parts of kanji) with no logographic meaning. Example: 気 = [ ki ] translated as energy or power in English e.g. Aikdo = 合気道. However, キ or き = [ ki ] from katakana and hiragana respectively are syllabaric sounds with no logographic meaning.
PM me if you want to talk about a great kanji for your son’s name. I’d be happy to help !
Since no one answered your question, I will.
Hiragana is a basic, simplified Japanese script that came from simplifying Chinese characters into a syllabary. It’s used for word where there are no kanji, particles, and name suffixes. Such as を, a particle showing what part of the sentence the direct object is; or さん, which reads “san” as in 綾唯美さん, (Ayumi-san). They can also be used with kanji, like in the word 食べる (taberu) which is a verb meaning “to eat”.
Katakana is another syllabary. It’s shapes are even more simple than Hiragana. It’s used to write foreign words like パン (pan) which means bread. (I think it comes from the Portuguese word for bread.) or コンピューター (konpyuta) which means computer.
Kanji is used to write whole words, or ideas. There’s thousands of kanji, although only 1,945 are widely used. They also came from Chinese characters, but had little or no modification. Examples are: 車 (kuruma) car, 草(kusa) grass, and 紫 (murasaki) which is the color purple.
Hope I helped you, and if someone notices a mistake I made, please correct me.
Thanks for jumping the gun on this one teh_universe and your erudite explanation. FYI I’ve previously answered Chance666 via PM…in detail. Saying that, next time your in Roppongi you can buy me a drink at TGIF. I’ll be the old guy sitting at the bar with the attractive young lady on one arm and the punch perm on the other. Just kidding homie… Only one arm….:D
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