Translation

Hi guys,

Not normally on the Japanese boards but the following has all of my Japanese-speaking friends stumped.

I managed to buy an exceptionally rare piece of Japanese lacquerware recently but I can't find any way to transcribe the signature of the artist. A friend's wife is a native speaker and even she's not sure as it's apparently a stylised bit of old Kanji.

I'd be HUGELY grateful if someone could transcribe it and type the correct Kanji characters here for me.

Many thanks!

Joe.

I don't think this is Japanese.
The second and fourth Kanji don't exist in our language.
I have no idea what the third letter is (even if it were Japanese).
It's quite likely that this is Chinese, then it's no strange we Japanese find it impossible to figure out what it is.

Have to agree with the above. If the craftsman was Japanese, perhaps his teacher was Chinese and he took his name (a common practice in the arts world). Or perhaps the craftsman was himself Chinese.

Jiyushugi said:

Have to agree with the above. If the craftsman was Japanese, perhaps his teacher was Chinese and he took his name (a common practice in the arts world). Or perhaps the craftsman was himself Chinese.

Thanks for your response.

I'll probably have to send it to Sotheby's. The box is 100% Japanese urushi lacquerware from the early Meiji period. Out of interest, I got this email from a friend yesterday:

"The problem is the vast majority of Japanese people can't read Jinmeiyo Kanji which predates about 1946. And very few Japanese people ever pass the test above level 2 for the Kanji Kentei. In fact 95% of Japanese people would struggle to understand even 10% of the Level 1 examination of the "Kanken". So when you also add in all the characters for names BEFORE 1946 it's very unlikely you will find a Japanese person who can read that signature. You need a specialist".

kanadaaa said:

I don't think this is Japanese.
The second and fourth Kanji don't exist in our language.
I have no idea what the third letter is (even if it were Japanese).
It's quite likely that this is Chinese, then it's no strange we Japanese find it impossible to figure out what it is.

Thanks for your reply. Please see the response I gave above. Apparently the problem is the abolition of many Jinmeiyo Kanji characters in 1946. I don't know why the Japanese Government chose to do this but my guess is it was to stop Kanji usage from becoming even more complicated.

Sorry XYZ, but jimmēyō kanjis are not the characters abolished during the post-WWII reformation. Rather it is a set of characters that has come back into use for naming children. The first batch of them were sanctioned in 1951 and they are still growing in number.

Anyway, your lacquerware has a very difficult signature. The first two characters seem 一船 but the rest is much more difficult. If it was signed by a Japanese, I wonder if they were not created like special signatures called kaō. Kaō is as fanciful as to render 家康 (Iyeyasu; the first of the Tokugawa shōguns) like this. It would help us if you could explain more about the provenance of the product.