Ii Kanji
by Emer McPolin

As I peruse through the Kanji dictionary on the desk beside me I ponder to myself, how on earth the Japanese can know, memorise and understand this writing system that does not seem to have evolved beyond Cuniform. To me it is the most sadomasochistic self-defeating means of recording the spoken word in the world and the strangest thing is that the Japanese people pride themselves upon this fact! It doesn't seem to matter to them that unless they devote their entire lives to its study, they will never fully know all the Kanji that exist in the world. In a country where there is a minimum Kanji requirement (approx 2000) to read a newspaper, one has to wonder why they hell did the Japanese adopt Kanji in the first place? What I want to know was who was it that wrote the very first Kanji? What was he thinking? Was he experiencing a thought process only usually brought about by the ingestion of Class A drugs? Maybe he was drunk? What apocalyptic event could have spurred the mass populous into thinking…' Kanji eh? What a great idea!!'

There is no doubt about the fact that it is indeed a truly aesthetically beautiful communication and typographical system but it is also, on the flip side, hard as rocks! As a designer and an art teacher in what seems like a previous life, other foreigners and indeed Japanese people have said to me, 'Oh…you should find Kanji quite easy!' This statement is usually followed by my raucous laughter. Maybe the finished Kanji does, through each being a scaled down art form, embed itself in my medium term memory, but it is the nitty-gritty, the scaffolding of each character such as the stroke order and the 10 different readings that evade me every time. As a designer, I can't seem to see past the intricate patterns and beautiful pictograms of which Kanji is comprised and uncover the meaning. Every Kanji to me is a masterpiece. The whiteboard behind my Kochou Sensei is a work of art. Before I start a class, it pains me to have to clean the blackboard of this complex script as I can only think of how long it must have taken to write and how utterly mundane the English I am about to replace it with is.

Kanji, the Japanese language and indeed Japan herself represents to me a tightly woven silk cocoon, with only a privileged few on the inside who fully comprehend. The rest of us must be content to stay soto and admire it's beauty but never fully grasp or understand it's intricacies.

As a graphic designer, I am trained to know what is ephemeral and what is not. What information is necessary and what is superfluous. My own personal approach to design is that of minimalism. I am, or should I say, was 100% Swiss. Japan has managed to turn my aesthetic mindset on its head. So much information and communication through typography and I can't understand any of it! This has truly yanked the Oriental rug from right under my feet as up until this point, understanding communication is my business and in this country I am typographically redundant. Some may argue that this goes for any foreign language but I will pre-emptively register my rebuttal by saying that in the majority of languages there is a set structure that bears parallels to the English Alphabet. Master that and it is half the