Let's read in 日本語！

Some background: Japanese is written with a mix of kana (which are phonetic characters that each represent a sound) and kanji (more complex characters which have both a meaning and often multiple possible sounds).

But little kids aren't expected to know every kanji yet, and there can be obscure words or names with oddball pronunciations that would puzzle any reader. So you can also put some small kana alongside the kanji to tell people how to pronounce it. Those are called furigana, and they're common in a lot of manga for youngish audiences.

As an example, here's the kanji 神 (meaning "god") with the furigana that say かみ (kami) in case you didn't know how to spell that one in kanji yet:

But at some point someone figured out that, hey, you don't HAVE to have the furigana match the kanji. There's nothing stopping you from just...

Using a foreign or made-up word but with a built-in definition: the kanji 祓魔師 (exorcise-demon-professional) pronounced as the English word エクソシスト (ekusoshisuto = exorcist)

Letting a character talk to himself really literally: 俺 (me) with the furigana おまえ (omae = you). You, by which I mean me,

Harping on the fact that you have a light themed villain this arc: 光 (light) but with the OTHER WHOLE KANJI 闇 (darkness) as the pronunciation. Darkness, but our darkness is Different because it's actually Light...

Clarifying what someone means like a little parenthetical statement: 俺達 (us/we) pronounced イルミナティ (iruminati = Illuminati). We, the Illuminati...

And many more. Those were just examples from Blue Exorcist that I already had saved to my hard drive. I cannot emphasize enough how much manga likes to create double meanings this way.

As you might imagine, this can be awkward to translate into a language that doesn't have even the slightest concept of furigana.

Usually you end up doing something that either ignores it (just pick the word that was most important of the two, or use the made up word but only define it the first time) or gets the job done but feels a bit like a cop-out (list both words, or put one in parentheses after the other)

But not always. Not in this one case from the first chapter of Blue Exorcist, translated for Viz by John Werry:

me reading hikaru 9: 辻中くん山岸くん頑張れ！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！

You won't believe it, but I actually started reading!

Today, 7 July, is Tanabata, a Japanese festival centered around stars, the milky way, romance, as well as hopes and aspirations for the future.⭐✨

If you want to find out more about the customs and history of Tanabata in simple Japanese, take a look at the texts and articles below. Most of these texts have a reading level fitting for JLPT N5 and N4 readers and all texts are freely available online!

Hirogaru （ひろがる）

The article on the website hirogaru introduces the star festival with large pictures and few sentences. You can toggle furigana for this text in theory but it might not work depending on your device. However, all text also has a read out loud function. There is also a small reading comprehension quiz at the end.

https://hirogaru-nihongo.jp/hoshi/article/tanabata/

NIHONGOSCHOOL Blog

On Kazue Ono's blog, she writes about the Tanabata festival in three levels: for starters, beginners and intermediate readers. The blog post has audio options for all three levels, can be downloaded as a PDF and also features a reading comprehension quiz here.

https://www.nihongoschool.co.uk/post/にほんごブログ：七月七日

Watanoc （和タのC）

Although the free web magazine Watanoc hasn't had new articles for a while now, their article about Tanabata still holds up and gives a great overview about the festival. You can hover over words and phrases to get the reading as well as a translation into English. After each paragraph you can also click to translate the entire sentence into English as well.

https://watanoc.com/post-1607-tanabata

Matcha Magazine

If you are interested in reading about the street festivals and parades taking place, Matcha Magazine recommends some great Tanabata festivals in the Kanto region to check out. Their article has full furigana and added spaces between words.

https://matcha-jp.com/easy/367

Hukumusume （福娘物語）

There is a legend behind Tanabata and you can read it in a simpler Japanese version on hukumusume, which is a place for free online children's stories. Although this text is not written with learners in mind, it features both furigana and cute colorful illustrations that guide readers along.

Please scroll past the videos at the beginning of the page. The full text is just below.

http://hukumusume.com/douwa/kisetu/tanabata/s5_html/02.htm

Tadoku no Hiroba (たどくのひろば)

For learners approaching intermediate abilities (N4-N3), I can recommend this short story by Tadoku no Hiroba. It is both longer than the articles above and features more complicated grammar points and speech registers, but still features 100% furigana on all kanji.

https://tadoku.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/7gatsu7katanabata_ruby.pdf

作った奴絶対に許さない

or, “How the transition to horizontal writing went both ways on the sides of cars”

In Japan, some company cars and trucks write the company’s name from the front of the car to the back: left to right on the left side, but from right to left on the right side.

It’s not well documented why people did that, but my personal pet theory is that this started when Japanese was still in the transition from vertical writing (columns right to left) and had to decide between which way to write Japanese horizontally.

Top to bottom, right to left

According to Wikipedia’s article on “horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts”, before WWII, Japanese was written horizontally only in one row when constrained for space, and since columns went from right to left, the one row went from right to left.

Here is an old print ad for Calpico (カルピス) where the logo, being horizontal, reads from right to left, and the ad copy underneath goes from top to bottom, right to left:

This is a lot like writing words top to bottom with upright Latin letters. Here are two signs in Dutch for a liquor store (slijterij), one vertical and the other horizontal.

But especially after WWII when Japan rushed to Westernize, Japan adopted left-to-right horizontal writing to match the Latin alphabet. This follows the footsteps of the January 1915 issue of the Chinese magazine Science, which wrote Chinese horizontally to make various scientific formulae easier to read.

本雜誌印法，旁行上左，並用西文句讀點之，以便插寫算術及物理化學諸程式，非故好新奇，讀者諒之。

This magazine is printed sideways from the top left, and marked with Western punctuation. This is to make more convenient the insertion of mathematical, physical and chemical formulae, and not for novelty's sake. We ask for our readers' understanding.

Coincidentally, this solution was mostly equivalent to rotating vertically written Japanese 90° to the left, then rotating every letter 90° to the right.

Why not both?

The thing is that there was a pretty long time in Japan where left-to-right and right-to-left writing coexisted. So when writing text on vehicles, people wrote the name from the front to the back, so that a stationary observer can read it better when the vehicle is in motion. But it’s weird now that left-to-right won out by a huge margin.

Here are two advertisement plaques for Calpico—I don’t know when the specific dates are—that have motly the same design, but the older one (using the kyūjitai 戀) goes from right to left, and the newer one (using the shinjitai 恋) goes from left to right. (I don’t know why the character in the ad looks so blackface-y, but it’s what it is...)

This post was prompted by this Quora question, which listed some times when this practice went sideways (pun definitely intended). Translation follows.

Q: Why are company names, like on the side of a truck, written from right to left?

Answer by Kōji Hirano • president of idealShip, Inc. (2006–now) • 1215 answers written, seen 130.87 million times

There are various hypotheses, but the prevailing one is that it’s in imitation of ships writing letters from the front to the back to make it clearer which side it’s facing. Though, I don’t think a truck needs to imitate that, being obvious which end is the front end of one...

Also, I’ve directly heard before that many companies do it as a good luck charm to keep the company moving forward. They seem to associate going against the direction of movement with things going badly, and want to avoid that.

I often hear the hypothesis that it’s easier for a moving car to read it when the text goes from the front to the back, but I don’t trust that...

You see this↑ brand often! It’s Sujahta. [Note: written “スジャータ”, a dairy product company, and the #1 brand of coffee creamer and chilled soup in Japan as of 2009]

Writing backwards causes these kinds of... mishaps...

Not 送輸—トイレ : [portTrans — Toilet]... but レイトー輸送 [Reitō Transport]

Not わかいあの肉 [That Young Meat]... but 肉のあいかわ [Aikawa Meats].

Not 所業エロ山 [Actions Lewd Mountain]... but 山口工業所 [Yamaguchi Industrial Works]

Not クッサア [EW, IT REEKS!]... but アサック [Asack]

At this point I’m upper intermediate, so I know most of the essential skills that carry over between different settings. Basic grammar, function words, listening fundamentals.