Tag: ateji

瓦　kawara—roof tiles

Published on by daraconnolly2 Comments

Some weeks ago, I cycled to see a “roof-tile stupa” – a 7th-century earthen mound or pyramid covered in roof-tiles.

This stupa was constructed by a monk called Gyouki who helped to promote Buddhism in Japan in the 7th century, and also did lots of works to help the poor, such as building clinics, carp ponds, and irrigation (as well as stupas).

Anyway, you can see the ceramic roof tiles from 1300 years ago. The design is simple: alternating rows of hemi-cylindrical convex tiles and quarter-cylindrical concave tiles.

Ceramic roof-tiles (kawara) are still a distinctive and appealing feature of Japanese houses, and they have evolved lots of interesting features to reward a closer look.

Nowadays the convex marugawara and flat hiragawara are usually combined into a single tile, creating an elegant, wavy roof surface. The house below features both styles.

At the end of the ridges on the upper roof, you can also see the scary faces of onigawara – ogre tiles.

The pendant discs on the end tiles are gaitou, and they often have a particular circular pattern like tadpoles or commas.  This very ancient symbol, called tomoe, is reminiscent of Celtic forms such as the triskel.

Lots of roofs have other decorative features, such as turtles, fish, dragons, gods…

Note on the word of the day:

In an earlier post, I remarked on the fact that the Japanese word for gas, normally written in katakana as ガス, can be written using kanji characters: 瓦斯. This is very unusual for a loan-word from English.

Anyway, the first character in is 瓦, which is the character for roof-tile. In this case it is merely being used for its sound value “GA” (the Chinese pronunciation of 瓦). When a kanji is used purely for its sound value, this is called ateji.

ガスビル　gasu biru—The Gas Building

Published on by daraconnolly2 Comments

I work in the Osaka Gas Building, an elegant pre-war building on Midosuji Avenue in the middle of Osaka.

The Gas Building was designed by Takeo Yasui and opened in 1933. It was painted black during the war and was one of the few buildings in the area to survive the bombing. The north half (seen in the above photo) is a later addition.

The Gas Building restaurant on the 8th floor is open to the public, and in 1933 was the first western-style restaurant in Osaka. It is a beautiful space with curved glass walls overlooking the city, and the original wooden décor. Their signature dish is the “Special Gas Building curry”, the name of which I find childishly amusing.

The building is a little bit Déco:

As is another, more familiar, Gas Building on the other side of the world (also, coincidentally, dating from 1933):

The Dublin Gas Building in D’Olier Street has some amazing interior features, but it doesn’t have a shrine on the roof. This shrine (complete with guardian foxes) is on the roof of the Osaka Gas Building, directly above where I work.

The entrance at street level is flanked by these gas-lights:

There are original period interior features, but I didn’t feel comfortable about taking photos inside the building.

Note on the word of the day:

Japanese shortens the English word “Building” to ビル biru. This despite the fact that there is of course a perfectly good word for building in Japanese: 建物　tatemono. A huge number of loan words are used in Japanese even when there is an existing Japanese word. Loan words from English are usually written in katakana, for example ガス　gasu—gas.

But look at this:

I was amazed to see the word “gas” written in kanji like this: 瓦斯. This is an extremely rare case of a loan word from a western language being written in kanji. There are so few examples of this that the same examples are always used: tabako (tobacco) can be written as 煙草; peeji (page) as 頁. I also recently found out that there are kanji (rarely used nowadays) for the various SI units and their prefixes and suffixes. (Though consider that Roman-letter abbreviations such as cm or kg are kanji, when they are used in Japanese.)

By coincidence, the kanji 瓦　which appears in the sign above as the first character in gasu is also the character used for gram. Its original meaning is roof-tile, and it is in that role that I will return to it in a later post.