Okay, vacation’s over.  Time to get back to work.

A. 雨　B. 風　C. 雷　D. 霧　E. 雲　F. 晴　G. 雪

Some of you may have noticed that many of these characters contained a shared element, identified by Shirley as “the cloud.”  It is, in fact, a compressed version of character A, which means rain.  Now, as I may have mentioned before, if you see a part of a kanji character that you recognize from another one that you already know, you can guess that they have similar meanings, though since I told you these were all weather-related, that probably wouldn’t help much.  And also, shared elements sometimes indicate similar pronunciation rather than similar meaning, so it’s a tricky process at best.  However, none of that has anything to do with wind, one of only two characters here to not include the rain radical (a term used to refer to parts that show up in multiple characters, such as in this example).  Wind is B.  Nobody got it.  Better luck next time.

This is not to say, however, that none of you got anything correct.  Shirley, who boldly set out to take stabs at all of them, walked away with a decent score–though I regret to inform her that “This time, No rhyme.  Except that one.” is not a haiku, as the haiku form is one of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables.  She picked out rain right off the bat, one of the few easily identifiable kanji characters, in my opinion (it looks like rain falling outside a window).  She missed the next couple, though I award partial credit for her guess of “radio” for C, because C is thunder, which is caused by lightning, which is a form of electricity, without which radios could not function.  She also gets partial credit for guessing “hail” for D, even though the character means “fog,” because I was considering using the character for hail instead.  E, A Fan’s flying hibachi, is a cloud, and F was correctly identified by Shirley as meaning “sunny.”  I almost tripped up Dragon by throwing in a character with a backwards E in order to get her to accidentally guess E, though you might wonder why I bothered, as neither answer was correct.  G is the weather my hometown is best known for: snow.

50 points to Theoman for locking himself in the house and trying to avoid all this weather.  That’s the only smart thing to do.

I’ve been thinking a fair amount about going back to school recently, so this week we’re going to have a back-to-school themed puzzle.  The following is a list of things you can study in school.  Now, this may seem like a lot of characters to deal with at first, but really it’s not so bad.  Notice how five of the six end with the same kanji? That just means “study” or “learning,” so for the purposes of this quiz you can basically ignore it.  Anyway, go ahead and pick out from the list the one discipline in which I never took a class in college, which, in this case, will be political science.

A. 外国語 B. 心理学 C. 数学 D. 政治学 E. 文学 F. 歴史学

A. 鈴木一朗 B. 野茂英雄 C. 福留孝介 D. 松井秀喜 E. 松坂大輔

Before we start, I would like to offer special congratulations to Shirley, for making part of her response rhyme, and to A Fan, for bravely ignoring the fact that I said these were all players who had played in Major League Baseball and pulling out Sadaharu Oh.

It should come as no surprise that participants were 3-for-3 in identifying A, Suzuki Ichiro, the first and only man to hit an inside-the-park home run in an All-Star Game.  After all, his page comes up on Wikipedia when you search just “Ichiro,” (a name that means nothing more than “first son”) and on this page it quotes his agent as saying that if you send a letter to Japan (a nation of over 127 million, roughly half of whom are someone’s first son) labeled with just that name, it will get to him.

We had a tie for the batting championship, with both Dragon and Shirley putting up a formidable .400.  Dragon cleverly identified E as Matsuzaka Daisuke (or “Dice-K,” a nickname that more closely reflects the actual pronunciation than it deserves to), the first Japanese pitcher to win an MLB playoff game.  Shirley, understandably, after having watched him play in the outfield of her beloved Cubs for the past few years, picked out C as Fukudome Kosuke, the man with two olympic medals (but, sadly, no gold, and, even more sadly, no World Series ring.  But hey, there’s always next year.)  A Fan, the pitcher’s best friend (the batter who swings at the same pitch every time) got only Ichiro.  Perhaps he, like Brian Buchanan, should try spending a few years in the NPB in an attempt to revive his career.

There was no love for D, the 2009 World Series MVP, Matsui Hideki (or “Godzilla,” as he prefers to be called), but he played for the Yankees, so why should there have been?  Batters were also perplexed by the forkball of Nomo Hideo, B, the first Japanese player to permanently relocate to the American major leagues.

Now I don’t know about you, but around here we’ve been having a fair amount of weather lately.  Let’s see if you can dive into this list of basic weather-related kanji and pick out “wind” (and anything else you may feel jumps out at you.)

A. 雨　B. 風　C. 雷　D. 霧　E. 雲　F. 晴　G. 雪

A. 猪　B. 兎　C. 龍　D. 虎　E. 鼠　F. 羊　G. 蛇

The first to step into the fray this week was Dragon, who pounced with cat-like celerity on E.  We can applaud her enthusiasm, though not her accuracy.  She must have seen that other movie, Crouching Rat, Hidden . . . uh . . . Walrus.  Next to bat was Theoman, who watched the correct film but, unfortunately, the wrong half.  C, named by Shirley as “the most aesthetically pleasing,” is the dragon, which, in his case, is an appropriate guess, I suppose.  Our friend A Fan, as always a fan of elegant simplicity, chose the character with the fewest strokes, F.  While not the right answer, it is at least an animal whose ferocity nearly equals that of the tiger: the sheep.

But they were all outshone by Shirley, our cleanup hitter, who, refusing to be distracted by Blake, settled on the correct answer, D.  And let’s not forget our other participants, who rounded out our lineup in their own quiet way: the boar (A), the rabbit (B), and the snake (G).

Now for our weekly reminder about the complexity of kanji: these characters only represent the animals.  For the astrological signs associated with these animals, there is an entirely different set of twelve characters.  I’ll pull them out some day if I’m feeling malicious.

This week is a special week.  As those of you who follow baseball know, tomorrow is the All-Star Game, in honor of which I thought we could have a baseball-themed challenge.  But not just any challenge!  As the brightest stars assemble in Anaheim, so too will this week’s puzzle bring out the mightiest of the KYPC participants.  Before today, we have worked only with single characters. Now you must deal with . . . names.

Below is a list of five famous Japanese Major League Baseball players.  Their names have been kept in the traditional Japanese “Family name first, given name second” order, just in case that means anything to you.  And, because I know that some of my readers pay limited attention to our national pastime, I will identify the players by their accomplishments rather than their names.  Feel free to match as many or as few as you like, and, if you’re feeling extra confident, you can even try to add in a name.

On this list are: 1. The first Japanese player to permanently relocate to MLB, 2. The first Japanese pitcher to win an MLB playoff game, 3. The first player to hit an inside-the-park home run in an All-Star Game, 4. A man who has won two Olympic medals (one silver, one bronze), and 5. A World Series MVP

A. 鈴木一朗 B. 野茂英雄 C. 福留孝介 D. 松井秀喜 E. 松坂大輔

A. 北　B. 西　C. 東　D. 南

A. 上　B. 下　C. 左　D. 右

Okay, so there wasn’t much challenge in the first part of the challenge this week.  You all figured out that the cardinal directions were on top.  But it seems I haven’t completely lost my touch, because none of you were able to pick out North.  Shirley was the closest, briefly considering A, the correct choice, before being lured away by the subtle, intoxicating stuff going on at the very top of B, which in fact points due West.  We can also give her some credit for identifying A and B of the second line as up and down, respectively.  A Fan and Dragon, meanwhile, fearing the cold winds of the North, fled South to D and took refuge beneath its all-encompassing roof.  If A Fan had known a little more about Hokkaido, he might have remembered that its name is written with character A, thus providing him with a key clue.  And Dragon has learned that it is not “x,” nor “squished t” that marks the spot, but, er, . . . “capital H that has been ripped down the middle and flipped inside out . . . with a couple extra lines.”  C, the East, unlike it is every year in the world of U.S. sports, was completely ignored.

Oh, and Bottom C is left and Bottom D is right, but as Shirley pointed out, they’re not really important anyway.

Since it went pretty well last time, this week we will be taking a look once more at animals.  These ones are going to be somewhat more exotic, because this time my source is the Chinese Zodiac, or as we refer to it in Japanese, the jûnishi.  Just for reference, the twelve animals involved are rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, and boar.  While you’re free to attempt to identify the entire zoo, the specific challenge is to pick out the tiger, far and away the best of the lot.

A. 猪　B. 兎　C. 龍　D. 虎　E. 鼠　F. 羊　G. 蛇

A. 冊　B. 台　C. 杯　D. 匹　E. 本　F. 枚　G. 羽

Clearly, this week’s puzzle was too easy, because pretty much everyone got it either right or partially right.  A Fan was dead on with his guess of A, which proves that sometimes laziness is the answer.  Shirley came close, for while she was not able to identify the classifier used when counting books, she did pick out the kanji that means “book” (yes, they’re different).  It seems that Dragon should perhaps lose points for specifically abandoning the correct answer, but the precise description of the meaning of B serves to remind us that reading is an act of serious devotion . . . and, apparently, decapitation.

So here we go.  A is the counter word used for counting books or other bound volumes.  B covers a variety of machines, including computers, microwaves, and cars.  C is for glassfuls and is part of the expression “Kampai!” the Japanese equivalent of “Cheers!” (though in terms of exact meaning, it is closer to “Down the hatch!”)  D is a counter word for animals (and, if you feel like being rude, people).  E is nice and confusing, because while on its own it means “book,” among other things, it is the counter word for long, cylindrical objects.  The definition of “cylindrical” is pretty broad, however, and it can be used to count a wide variety of objects, including pens, trees, swords, umbrellas, roads, and even (in a metaphorical sense) telephone calls and bus routes.  F is for flat objects like pieces of paper, plates, and CD’s.

G is the counter for birds, which I included for two reasons.  One is that it features in the Japanese equivalent of “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo“: niwa ni wa niwa niwatori ga iru.  It means “There are two chickens in the garden.”  Our counter word friend G is the third wa.

The other reason is this passage from Wikipedia, which I found while doing “research” for this entry:

“Japanese Buddhist monks were not allowed to eat any meat other than birds, but they liked rabbit meat so much they came up with the contrived ‘explanation’ that rabbits are actually birds, and that their ears are unusable wings. The rationale was that while moving, the rabbits touched ground only with two feet at a time.”

Oh, those wacky monks!

I know that some of you sometimes feel lost when reading KYPC, so I’ve decided to help you out by teaching you some directions.  Here is this week’s two-part challenge: I am giving you two sets of directions, one generic (up, down, left, right) and one cardinal (North, South, East, West).  First you get to guess which is which, and then you can see if you can pick out North.  Once you have, we’ll be able to use this information to align our linguistic compasses, and you’ll never be lost again.  Possibly.

A. 北　B. 西　C. 東　D. 南

A. 上　B. 下　C. 左　D. 右

A. 加　B. 独　C. 仏　D. 米　E. 蘭　F. 露

First of all, KYPC would like to welcome Theoman to the fray and salute him for taking a different approach.  That being said, his guess as to what B might sound like is roughly the same as his letter grade would be if this was a traditional test.  In this case, the sound it produces is do.  Say it all together now: “D’oh!”

If this were any other game, A Fan would presumably know better than to hedge his bets by guessing every single answer.  That being said, his intuition provided him with some very useful hints this time around, though he could use some work interpreting them.  A is a country legendary for the rudeness of its citizens . . . Canada (kanada).  The character means to increase, as in, “We went to Canada, and the temperature just kept increasing . . . negatively.”

B, the German tank taking its favorite shortcut through Belgium, is, in fact, Germany (doitsu, like “Deutschland”).  The character means “alone,” running the full range of connotations from “independent” to “isolated.”  D is not a Frenchman but an American, who has even more reason to celebrate that goofy goal (amerika, though in modern Japanese it is usually pronounced bei).  It means rice, which could mean that we love our grains, or it could mean that we’re rich, since for many years rice was synonymous with wealth in Japan.  Also interesting to note is that the Chinese use a different character to represent the U.S., one that means “beautiful.”  So the Japanese think we’re rich and the Chinese think we’re pretty.

Now we come to our two friends on the far right, including F, A Fan’s “official” guess, perhaps because he thought that I had slipped up and subconsciously made France choice F.  However, it is in fact the great sleeping bear of the East, good old Russia (roshia).  The character means neither sleep nor bear but “dew” or “tears,” which I think Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy would appreciate.  And E is Holland (oranda), represented by the symbol for orchid.  A tulip would have been better, I suppose, but hey, they were close.

The only true answer was hit upon by our dynamic duo, Dragon and her inexplicably psychically linked partner Shirley, who saw through the orchids, the rice, and the dew to France, letter C (furansu, though the character is more commonly pronounced bu or butsu).  This one probably his the least explicable definition of all: Buddha.  So let’s stick to the explanations you came up with.  If you remember DeGaulle’s nose and that Gaul was divided into three parts (which, as I’m sure we all remember, were Gallia Cisalpina, Gallia Narbonensis, and Gallia Comata) you’ll have no trouble finding France.

Phew!  That was a lot to get through.  But we’re not done yet.  Since I know you must be tired from reading all that, let’s stick to a simple subject this week: counting.  We’ve already covered the easy part, the numbers one through ten, but sometimes that’s not enough.  Think about counting bread.  You can’t say, “two breads”; it’s “two slices of bread” or “two loaves of bread.”  Lettuce is the same way, as is paper, as are cattle.

Most counting in Japanese works this way, pairing a number with the appropriate counter word.  There are counters for cylindrical objects, flat objects, and various kinds of animals, but I’m a writer, so I want you to find the counter for books.

A. 冊　B. 台　C. 杯　D. 匹　E. 本　F. 枚　G. 羽

The KYPC Champion of the Week award goes to Shirley, for being the only one to correctly identify anything this time around: F is indeed a mountain.  Unfortunately, the correct answer (which, just in case anyone wasn’t sure, was “lake”) was D, the only character not to be mentioned by anyone.

A. 川　B. 島　C. 原　D. 湖　E. 森　F. 山

A is a river, which means that when Shirley thought of waves she had the right idea but the wrong axis of orientation.  B is an island, which you can tell because it has F, the character for mountain, tucked away in the bottom there, and islands are kind of like mountains on the ocean floor.  And the rest of the character is a bird, so you can picture the image of an island surrounded by gulls.  And you can remember that the rest of the character means “bird” because, as we discussed in a previous entry, it looks like a dinosaur, and dinosaurs evolved into birds.  That may seem like a lot just to remember “island,” but sometimes the best kanji mnemonics are the most convoluted.

Anyway, C represents not the drainage pond in the cloverleaf loops but the field that used to be there before they decided to put in a freeway.  D is our lake, which offers little in the way of obvious explanation.  You may recognize the moon on the right, which could evoke the image of moonlight reflecting off a calm lake surface.  Or it may symbolize the vaguely crescent-shaped Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest freshwater lake.  E, sadly, is neither three water boatmen nor three acrobatic water skiers but three trees, and hence, a forest.  And F is the mountain, who, in typical mountain fashion, does very little to disguise his presence.

But enough of this small-time stuff.  It’s time to take on geography on a much grander scale.  Now we’re going to deal with countries.  In Japanese, the majority of foreign countries are referred to by names that use Japanese syllables to approximate their sounds: the U.S. is amerika, Mexico is mekishiko, and so on.  Today they are written with katakana, characters which have a sound but no meaning, but originally they used kanji.  These were ateji, kanji used for their sound rather than their meaning (Chinese, which has nothing but picture characters, uses a similar process to represent foreign names).  So, the meanings of the characters don’t have anything to do with the countries themselves . . . or do they?

While kanji are no longer used to write out countries’ full names, often times one of the old characters (typically the first one) has survived as a way of referring to the nation with which it was paired.  This is all just a long way of saying: find France.

A. 加　B. 独　C. 仏　D. 米　E. 蘭　F. 露

Congratulations to Shirley for taking a risk and sticking her neck out.  “Know Your Picture Characters” is not a game for the faint of heart.  Unfortunately, she would have been better off fishing just a few feet to the left, because the correct answer was not “F” but “A.”  I’m not totally sure how she was counting “elements;” kanji are generally classified by the number of strokes used to write them, which, with the exception of the numbers one, two, and three, typically has nothing to do with their meaning.  In this case, F is a 9-stroke character, and A and B are both 10.  In fact, none of the characters that appeared in this week’s challenge contain 7 strokes.

A consolation prize goes to A Fan, who completely failed to pick the right character but correctly identified that the Japanese love puns.  And special thanks to Dragon, for reminding us that, “there were a lot of wars in ancient times.”

The seven characters mean, in order: week, hour, month, year, day, second, and minute.  Many of these also have other meanings; longtime KYPC participants may recognize a kanji or two from our “Days of the Week” edition.

週　時　月　年　日　秒　分

But enough about time.  Let’s move on to someplace else.  Specifically, “place.”  Having taken care of the “when,” now we’re going to practice a bit with the “where.”  These characters all represent geographical features and should, theoretically, be easier to identify by how they look than things like colors or intervals of time.  So take a crack at picking out the one that represents the thing that there are 10,000 of in the state in which I live (I’ll give you a hint: it’s not mountains).

A. 川　B. 島　C. 原　D. 湖　E. 森　F. 山

The correct answer this week was F.  Congratulations to Dragon for her keen eye.  Personally, I think that G looks more like a bunch of plants, but that’s not the right answer, now is it?  As for B, A Fan’s inspired guess, it’s not the figurative “green with envy” but much more literally the color of the boyfriend’s face: red, and growing ever redder as he watches those tourists ogle his beskirted gal.

青　赤　黄　黒　白　緑　紫

So, to finish things off, our lineup consists of blue, red, yellow, black, white, green, and purple.  Also, a point of interest: that first character can also be used to describe bluish green; it’s the color of the sea, the sky, and the “GO” portion of a stoplight.

But that was clearly too easy.  We’re going to ramp up the difficulty now, and see how well you really know your colors.  Can you distinguish between the kanji for scarlet and vermilion?  Magenta and mauve?  Turquoise, aqua, and azure?  Burnt sienna?  Macaroni and cheese?

Just kidding.  As a matter of fact, I was thinking it was about time we learned a little about time.  Since this is a weekly feature, I think you should try to pick out the character that means “week.”

A. 週　B. 時　C. 月　D. 年　E. 日　F. 秒　G. 分

Two correct answers this week!  Very impressive!  The nose was indeed E.  As to why, I can’t really say.  Dragon’s and Shirley’s explanations seem as good as any.  500 points all around in celebration!

Let’s not forget the rest of our kanji friends, however.

顎　頭　顔　口　鼻　耳　目

You may have noticed that the first three all had the same part on the right side, which may have suggested to you that they had similar meanings.  This is a trick that can serve you well when dealing with . . . oh, about 60% of kanji.  For the other 40%, it’s anyone’s guess what the connection is.  In this case, though, it’s easy: they’re all related to the head.  Chin’s on the left, face is on the right, and the one in the middle is the old melon itself.

Next up is the most boring of the list, which happens to be the mouth (needless to say, it’s open).  The nose you know, of course, which leaves us with two more similar-looking characters.  On the far right we have the eye, which, if you turn it on its side, kind of looks like an eye if you round off the corners and color in the middle.  To its left is the ear, which also makes sense, because it’s basically just a . . . pointier . . . eye.  Right . . .

But let’s move on.  This week’s challenge is colors.  Since we’re smack-dab in the middle of Spring at the moment, I suppose the one you should be trying to pick out had better be green.

A. 青　B. 赤　C. 黄　D. 黒　E. 白　F. 緑　G. 紫