Kanji

A friend of mine started doing Tarot readings at the tattoo shop down the street, so I spent most of the afternoon hanging out with her as she waited for customers. Since it was a slow day, being her first weekend at it and nobody really knowing about it yet, we had plenty of time to look through all the dozens of tattoo and piercing books, posters and photo albums. It was interesting, to say the least. I've never really wanted a tattoo, or a Tarot reading for that matter, but after spending a while studying a chart of Japanese symbols, I started getting ideas. In addition to the usual Faith, Success, and Hope that you see everywhere, there were also words like Fart, Bendover and Whore. I'm seriously considering the Diarrhea one. Seriously. I would love so much to have someone say how pretty it is and then tell them what it means.
I always think it's weird when I see people with one of these symbols permanently scarred into their skin. Like, what? Japanese has some deep, hidden, special meaning to you because, because what? Because you're a twenty year old white American girl looking for depth and higher meaning? Because cryptic makes you mysterious? So guys will have a reason to talk to you? Whatever. "I'm deep and intelligent because I have a unique Asian-symbol tattoo on my lower back. Ask me what it means." Why don't you just get T-R-U-T-H inked on instead? Oops. Sorry for the rant. Back to what I learned today.

These Japanese symbols are called kanji, which are actually Chinese characters used in modern Japanese writing. Japanese writing uses three (or four, depending on something I can't quite grasp) different alphabets and kanji is one of the three. The first two alphabets represent syllables, and kanji represent more of the idea of the word. If that's not complicated enough, kanji can be read several different ways, depending on if it's in a sentence, called "on" reading, or if the word is by itself, called "kun" reading. If I understand correctly, which I'm sure I'm getting all of this wrong, you can put several kanji symbols together to create one word. My favorite example that I saw was the kanji for "crisis". You take the kanji for danger and put it right next to the symbol for opportunity, where you get Kiki, which means crisis.

Alright, that's enough of that. Maybe I'll just get the monkey tattoo instead.

私は決して漢字を理解しない