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Archive of 2026-10-21 · About this archive · Main site

Author Topic: Japanese (?) character readers - please tell me what my sake mug set says!  (Read 21,707 times)

mouser

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please help me solve this mystery.  i have a sake set and all around the main container and the little cups are writings.
i'd love to know what they say.  so many characters!!
i am assuming it's japanese but could be chinese -- correct me if i'm wrong!

[attachthumb]

wraith808

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you have an android device don't you?  You might try Google Translate.

PhilB66

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you have an android device don't you?  You might try Google Translate.

It looks like an old Chinese script... I do not think Google Translate will be of any help.

wraith808

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It looks like an old Chinese script... I do not think Google Translate will be of any help.


Maybe.  Maybe not.  Just figured I'd suggest for a try.  It does some pretty amazing things.

Curt

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My ABBYY Screenshot Reader would not recognize it as Japanese, Chinese or Korean - simplified or traditional.

Deozaan

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you have an android device don't you?  You might try Google Translate.

I gave that a try. It didn't help.

It didn't recognize most of the text, though it did pick out a couple of words such as "multi" (which could also be translated as "many"). But without knowing if it's Japanese or Chinese, I wasn't sure what to trust.

PhilB66

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It is an ancient Chinese script, the direction is top to bottom; it looks like Xiaozhuan (小篆) style but I am not 100% sure about that.

hayamaguchi

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For what it's worth, it's definitely Japanese.  The script is a mixture of Japanese cursive kanji characters (similar to Chinese characters) and Japanese hiragana phonetic characters.  I can read some snatches of the writing (poem?), but cursive characters defeat me.  The first column on the extreme right (the two characters) is probably the title of the work.  The first three characters of the of the third column from the right reads "fune-no-ho," meaning "the sail of a boat."  The writing is read from top to bottom, right to left.  Sorry I can't be of more help!

KynloStephen66515

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abc.PNG

No idea if this helps...but I got this far lol

Irrelevant

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I live in Japan, and have just asked my Japanese wife to look at your sake bottle and cup. What is written on the bottle is a chant used at weddings by the Shinto priest officiating at the ceremony. It's difficult, even for a native speaker of Japanese, to read and understand. It's like a poem. It has references to raising a sail on a sailboat, tides rising, and waves looking like islands in the distance over an open sea. You would probably have to ask a Shinto priest to translate it for you, and even then you'd most likely get what that priest's personal feelings concerning the meaning are. As for the cup, the heading is the word used for a type of Japanese angel. I would hazard a guess to it being similar in nature to the bottle, that being religious. My wife had to go to work, so we didn't have time to do the cup. Sorry about that. There is a translation of the writing on the bottle into modern day script on the Japanese wikipedia site.  Link  -  https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%AB%98%E7%A0%82_(%E8%83%BD) ; It's under the heading 歌詞. This is only what is written on the bottle, not the cup, and the following part is a short explanation describing how the chant sometimes changes  -  結婚式では「出潮⇒入潮(いりしお)」「遠く鳴尾⇒近く鳴尾」と変えて謡う場合が多い.
  I recommend you ask a native speaker to check languages in all cases. Especially languages like Japanese, which have hidden meaning taken as understood by the reader or listener. Google translator may do a good job on very simple Japanese sentences, but really can't do anything more difficult. Enjoy your sake. You should try to get hold of some Hakkaisan (八海山) sake. Drink it heated in winter, and cold Kubota sake for summer. Really good.
 

mouser

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Thanks so much Irrelevant, that's great info!

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