Yukishiro etymology ctd., etc.
Jul. 4th, 2006 08:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138Doh-- I know I've run into this info before, but evidently it fell out the back of my brain cell.
From a list of traditional season-marking phrases for haiku:
雪代 yukishiro, snowmelt runoff (mid spring)
(Aha-- I think that my previous encounter with this was on this other list, which doesn't include the kanji; now I don't feel quite so dumb. Mostly. Ook.)
As an additional but not-quite-relevant factoid, on a recent bookstore jaunt, I browsed through a book about the cultural history of red dyes, mostly from a Western-civ perspective; it mentioned that the invention of synthetic alizarin dye in the mid-19th century caused the collapse of most of the industries that'd been built around growing and extracting the natural red dyestuffs. One of these was the madder root, known in Japan as akane (茜: the same kanji as the name of one of the girls who died protecting Shinta-- cf. the OVA's chara ref sheets; Sakura and Akane are on the first sheet in the third black-and-white row).
Going strictly by the colors on the tankoubon covers, Kenshin's clothing is a dark, slightly cold (blue-undertoned) red that's very similar to the traditional color akane-iro (茜色). Conversely, his hair is a lighter carroty red that's closer to another traditional color, hi-iro (緋色-- color swatches for both of these are also on the same pages as the refs for akane-iro), which has the same first kanji as Kenshin's so-called family name, Himura (緋村): "scarlet village".
As a peasant under the Shogunate, Shinta wouldn't've had a family name. Some fans speculate that someone else gave him the name (Hiko? the Ishinshishi?) based on the color of his hair or, later on, his reputation for carnage. But my own pet theory is that he informally picked up a name from the place he came from, like the rest of Sano's family (Higashidani: eastern valley), and that his home village's main crop had been madder roots.
Annoyingly, I don't have any solid refs so far that definitely source the specific color hi-iro from the madder root; the only book I have about traditional Japanese dyeing is all about indigo. But madder seems to've been the only red dyestuff that was both widely grown and permitted in Japan-- the other natural red dyes were imported from the Continent or restricted to the Imperial family-- and the exact shade of red from the madder vats could've been tweaked back and forth with different mordants and concentrations.
Not that any of this really comes to a conclusion-- the immediate cause for Shinta being sold into slavery must've been his family dying from cholera-- but if his home village's main crop was being forced into obsolescence by the importation of foreign synthetic dyes on the Black Ships' successors, that would've been just one more reason to cash in an unwanted orphan instead of raising him up to work for them, the way that Soujirou was worked to the bone by his father's family.
From a list of traditional season-marking phrases for haiku:
雪代 yukishiro, snowmelt runoff (mid spring)
(Aha-- I think that my previous encounter with this was on this other list, which doesn't include the kanji; now I don't feel quite so dumb. Mostly. Ook.)
As an additional but not-quite-relevant factoid, on a recent bookstore jaunt, I browsed through a book about the cultural history of red dyes, mostly from a Western-civ perspective; it mentioned that the invention of synthetic alizarin dye in the mid-19th century caused the collapse of most of the industries that'd been built around growing and extracting the natural red dyestuffs. One of these was the madder root, known in Japan as akane (茜: the same kanji as the name of one of the girls who died protecting Shinta-- cf. the OVA's chara ref sheets; Sakura and Akane are on the first sheet in the third black-and-white row).
Going strictly by the colors on the tankoubon covers, Kenshin's clothing is a dark, slightly cold (blue-undertoned) red that's very similar to the traditional color akane-iro (茜色). Conversely, his hair is a lighter carroty red that's closer to another traditional color, hi-iro (緋色-- color swatches for both of these are also on the same pages as the refs for akane-iro), which has the same first kanji as Kenshin's so-called family name, Himura (緋村): "scarlet village".
As a peasant under the Shogunate, Shinta wouldn't've had a family name. Some fans speculate that someone else gave him the name (Hiko? the Ishinshishi?) based on the color of his hair or, later on, his reputation for carnage. But my own pet theory is that he informally picked up a name from the place he came from, like the rest of Sano's family (Higashidani: eastern valley), and that his home village's main crop had been madder roots.
Annoyingly, I don't have any solid refs so far that definitely source the specific color hi-iro from the madder root; the only book I have about traditional Japanese dyeing is all about indigo. But madder seems to've been the only red dyestuff that was both widely grown and permitted in Japan-- the other natural red dyes were imported from the Continent or restricted to the Imperial family-- and the exact shade of red from the madder vats could've been tweaked back and forth with different mordants and concentrations.
Not that any of this really comes to a conclusion-- the immediate cause for Shinta being sold into slavery must've been his family dying from cholera-- but if his home village's main crop was being forced into obsolescence by the importation of foreign synthetic dyes on the Black Ships' successors, that would've been just one more reason to cash in an unwanted orphan instead of raising him up to work for them, the way that Soujirou was worked to the bone by his father's family.
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no subject
on 2006-07-04 11:12 pm (UTC)Someday you WILL find the missing link between madder root and the color. I believe!
no subject
on 2006-07-06 05:27 am (UTC)