hana-kotoba the hard way

[wombat1138]

Found a little book entirely devoted to Japanese flower symbolism. However, it is almost entirely in Japanese. *headdesk*

At the moment, am slowly transliterating the individual flower names onto paper. They're all indexed in katakana regardless of etymology; I still deeply suck at recognizing katakana, and so am limping back and forth between the book and my handy kana ref chart. Some of them are obvious loanwords from the English flower names, throwing doubt on the traditionality of those particular flowers, but all of the species names are also provided in romaji, which should help with the final identification later. Each entry also seems to start with a brief summary of the meaning (I haven't started any kanji lookups yet), so hopefully I won't have to translate the full paragraphs of text that follow.

Still flailing through Okami; stalled on some of the timed minigames, some of which are supposedly optional but really aren't if you want any hope of being able to deal with certain beasties in normal combat without using up inventory items. OTOH the "thief's glove" makes it possible to generate goodies at will, though not by specific selection.

Comments

[branchandroot]

Oh wow. Now that's dedication. *rueful* I've let hanakotoba fall by the way for the moment, as I try to track down the bloody twelve shikigami instead, but I'd be very interested in anything you find out.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

? is there a canonical list of shikigami somewhere by names/characteristics, or are they somewhat series-specific?

[branchandroot]

Well, that's the hard part. They show up in several different anime/manga stories, and they're names and characteristics are consistent /enough/ that I suspected they must have a common source. This, indeed, appears to be the case.

I tracked them back to Abe no Seimei, through onmyoudou to China, and there it all unravels into guessing games. They're definitely associated with Chinese astronomy/astrology, but they seem to go back to pre-Han. I got side-tracked for a bit into Buddhist sets of twelve, but I think that's pretty much coincidental and not directly related. So I'm fishing around in this book and that, trying to match the characters of their names with various sky charts and star legends.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

At some point I unexpectedly found some ancient elemental-symbolism info in a book about jade burial artifacts, so you never know where stuff might turn up.

IIRC both Chinese and Japanese astrology tend to use the 28-constellation system that underlies various series ranging from Fushigi Yuugi to Crest/Banner of the Stars, but I've never really worked out how the 12-critter zodiac became associated with the (~12-year) orbit of the planet Jupiter... or if I have, it's since fallen out the other side of my brain cell :b

[branchandroot]

Yeah, there are twelve "houses" that the 28 fall into. And that isn't the source of the shikigami either, which I thought rather unfair. They seem to come more out of some of the accumulated legends of the four (or five counting the center) quarters, only... elaborated. And with some other stuff tossed in. That's the point in the search I'm at now, trying to find the other stuff. It's all amazingly more complicated than you can see from the commonly translated stuff. Par for the course. *wry*

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

Have you already seen the original Chinese list of the "Twelve Branches" before they were overlaid onto the animal zodiac? The Japanese juunichi beasties now use the "Branch" kanji, but there's an earlier list of meanings that doesn't seem to've ported online into Wikipedia etc.: 子 = "bud, young shoot, beginning of all things"; 丑 = literally "tied" but more loosely "the growth of things" and so on.

Source: Chinese Geomancy by Evelyn Lip, Singapore: Times Books International, 1979; I was particularly happy to find this book because it's a discussion of feng shui that predates the Western New-Ageification of the concept. (I still cherish the memory of seeing a book called "Celtic Feng Shui".)

[branchandroot]

No, I hadn't seen the older characters. That could be a promising link, thanks!

*weakly* Celtic... feng shui?