Cultural Exploits : Kanteiryuu (Kabuki Moji)

 Okay I know I haven't blogged for awhile but now I am finished with uni I thought I'd use this time to get up to date blogging about all the things I've been doing in Japan. I realised I don't actually talk about what I do at uni very often and this term I've been able to do a lot of fun stuff so I thought it might be nice to start blogging about it.

 The first topic up in my new series is : Kanteiryuu which is also known as Kabuki Moji or writing. We had a teacher come into our class and show us how to do the kind of writing you often see on posters advertising Kabuki (traditional style of Japanese play).

 Here Taknaka-sensei (the woman that came in to teach us) and my regular teacher are showing us some of the kind of writing we were going to be attempting in that class. I must admit I was a bit wary since I am rubbish at 書道 (Japanese calligraphy) and I thought I'd fail equally at this.

 These were the tools we used. It kinda felt like art class when I was younger what with laying out all the newspaper and everything. Tanaka-sensei said you can pretty much use any brush to do it. I was dubious but she said she sometimes uses children's paint brushes and her work is amazing.

 Here are some of my practise characters. I was drawing 雪、月 and 花. One of the main things I took from this is style is more important than the accuracy of the writing. 花 looks really stylised and nothing like it is usually written for example. As you can see I wasn't very good >.< It was really fun having a go though. Once I stopped thinking of it as writing and more like drawing I improved some.

 And to finish up here is an expert. All the characters are supposed to look fat and square-like, shown perfectly here by Tanaka-sensei. I think the coolest thing about this writing style is that it was developed by one guy and has been passed down his line. All that time they have been responsible for doing all the writing for Kabuki advertisements in Tokyo. Tanaka-sensei learnt from the member of the family currently in charge of all that.

I know this probably isn't that interesting to everyone but I thought I'd do some of this kinds of posts once in a while. Feel free to skip if you aren't interested. ^.^