Languages studying dumblr

poshichi

"click"

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]

藤時雨

2025年、ご近所。

久々にカメラを持って出かけた六義園ばかりになってしまったので、そろそろ過去写真から。

【Nomiboys Enjoying Parties】 Nomiboys love parties. They show up jumping up and down, and get everyone excited. Then, they dance to the music all awiggle and ashake. Their favorite food is coconut sugar.

According to Comenius's book, the sound a cat makes in Latin is "nau nau" .

Comenius (1592-1670) was a Czech educational philosopher and theologian known as the "father of modern pedagogy." He advocated comprehensive education that "taught everyone about everything," authoring the world's first illustrated textbook, "The Picture Book of the Whole World," and compiling his systematic educational method in "Great Pedagogy."

ラテン語での猫の鳴き声は、コメニウスの本によればnau nau（ナウナウ）です。

一休み、一休み、大切な時間

薄いこなしと練りじょうよで分厚い大島餡を挟んだ薄氷という和菓子と似たお菓子ですが、節分に併せてお多福の印が押され、全体の色は桃色に青と黄色の玉を配置し、華やかな色合いになっています。そして何よりも素晴らしいのは大島餡の美味しさです。餡の美味しさが際立ってます。

京都　源光庵　⛄️雪景色2026⛄️ 2026年 1月3日