Section 92 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 February 15 Sunday.
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Today on NHK I saw a very interesting program in which a Japanese calligrapher, a Mr Yoshikawa, went to a Japanese elementary school to teach kids aged 11 or 12 about kanji (the Japanese versions of Chinese characters.) This was an impressively imaginative lesson.

(I'm assuming that he's a professional calligrapher or something similar, though I don't know this for certain.)

Early on we saw Yoshikawa-san muscling a huge brush (sixty kilograms or so of brush, unless my ears mislead me) over a huge sheet of paper (or something) in the gym. The kids couldn't make out what he'd drawn, so ran upstairs to the gym's upper level from where they could look down on the pattern.

Yoshikawa-san's lesson seemed to be about transforming kanji in various ways. For example, we saw a shot of him in the classroom, and he had written some stuff on the chalkboard. I saw a conventional version of the Japanese kanji for "rain," the "ame" kanji, which looks like this:-

You can see, in this conventional representation of the kanji, four dashes, these representing four drops of rain. Kanji sometimes, but not always, contain pictorial elements which give clues to the meaning, and the four drops of rain are just such a clue.

Now, on the board next to this conventional "ame" there was what was obviously Yoshikawa-san's own original reinterpretation of the kanji. I only saw it briefly, and, in reconstructing it from memory, I have undoubtedly mutilated Yoshikawa-san's far more fluent original.

However, even so, I think I've caught the key element of Yoshikawa's playful creation in the following:-

In Yoshikawa-san's version (I'm assuming it's his original idea, as, though it was on the chalkboard, we didn't get an explanation of it) the rain drops (evidently) are bursting free from the confines of the glyph, and are falling.

Later, Yoshikawa got the kids to make the character "nama" out of clay ("nendo" - for me, today's new Japanese word.)

And, later still, the kids made models of kanji using coat hangers, hats, books, string, plastic bottles, straws, glitter and goodness knows what.

Then Yoshikawa had them apply paper to the three-dimensional shapes that they had made. The kids dipped their hands into black ink then patted the paper to impress the patterns of their threee-D constructs onto the paper.

This highly imaginative lesson was an episode in the "Kagai Jugyō" series, in which adults who have mastered some particular skill go back to the elementary schools at which they were once students and teach the same skill to kids in their final year at elementary school (kids aged about 11 or 12.)

I wrote about this "Kagai Jugyō" ("Extracurricular instruction" series back in December of 2003:-