Pictograms at Japan House London

How to Pack a Tiny Space with Meaning

The first word I ever learned in Japanese was the word for chair.

In English: chair.

In French: chaise. Easy.

Italian? Sedia. A bit harder, but still do-able - especially if you have a little Latin knocking around in your head.

In Japanese? Isu…

This was the first time I faced the cold, hard fact that learning Japanese would mean coming to terms with a brand new linguistic world. No bridges. No shortcuts.

Various words have entered Japanese from European languages, of course, many now represented using the katakana syllabary. Sometimes that helps. You can send someone a メール (meeru: mail) or pay in a shop using タッチ(tacchi: touch, i.e. contactless).

My children, when trying to please their mother by speaking Japanese, will fill in for any words they don’t know by trying out the English word in long, laboured syllables - just in case it’s on that ever-growing katakana list.

Most of the time it’s not, and for my wife the experience is a bit like having someone try to cross the linguistic boundary between English and Japanese simply by raising their voice and speaking in a patronising tone.

There’s no getting around it: Japanese is hard. But there are rewards.

For me, one of the greatest is the extraordinary compression of meaning that kanji makes possible. Coming from an alphabetical language like English, the hiragana syllabary was a relatively small leap: it was interesting, but not revolutionary, to encounter Japan’s capital city as とうきょう (To-kyo) in my study guide.

But then came 東京. Which isn’t simply a fancier way of writing ‘To-kyo’: it lets you say ‘To-kyo’ and it tells you that this is Japan’s ‘eastern’ (東) ‘capital’ (京) - the original capital (sort of) being Kyoto, to the west.

So many Japanese words involve beautiful combinations of kanji. Fireworks are 花火 (hanabi): literally ‘fire flowers.’ The great warlord Oda Nobunaga used to boast about bringing 天下 (tenka) - ‘all under heaven’ - under his control. And then of course there’s 漫画 (manga): ‘whimsical pictures’.

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From an advert for Tokyo fireworks displays. 10 points if you don’t read Japanese but can nevertheless spot ‘Tokyo’ and ‘hanabi’…

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I’ve been thinking about this potential for tightly-packed meaning in Chinese and Japanese characters this week thanks to a new exhibition at Japan House in London. It’s on pictograms, precursor to our much-loved emoji and pretty much ubiquitous in contexts where text in multiple languages would be impractical - or even where text in one language might be too much, for example in maps or road signs.

The new exhibition celebrates Japan’s contributions to the art and design of pictograms, not least its path-breaking Olympics in 1964. I went into Japan House to talk to Simon Wright, Director of Programming, about why it is that pictograms and their offspring emoji have been such a big part of Japanese culture, from the ultra-simple family crests known as kamon through to the very latest moving and three-dimensional pictograms being worked on by Japanese designers.

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A 3D sumo pictogram, on display at Japan House London

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The interview is below, and you can also listen back to it as a podcast - link at the top of my main Substack page.

Before you get stuck in, if you’re on Instagram and haven’t yet taken a punt on my new channel then please SIGN UP! It’s guaranteed to make me 😀

And if you have favourite kanji combinations, or would like to share a story of woe about learning Japanese, let me know in the comments!

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