Inscribings

One of the problems with the study of Proto-Japonic/Ryukyuan is the fact that before the introduction of characters from the Chinese "logo-syllabary", there was no writing system in Japan, and as far as I know, all other evidence of ancient Japonic civilization (as opposed to other, older civilizations that thrived in various parts of the Japanese archipelago before the arrival of the Yayoi) comes from Chinese texts, which don't usually give us much insight into the language as it existed at the time.

But not everyone wants to believe that, you see. I certainly don't -- I can't imagine how excited I would be to hear that someone had found an ancient inscription believed to have been written by an Proto-Japonic civilization. I'm not, however, going to go out of my way and say that it's actually likely anything of the sort actually exists. But that doesn't stop some people from making stuff up every once in a while for kicks.

A problem I occasionally must overcome is reading about Japanese history, in Japanese. I didn't graduate from a Japanese high school and thus I have not had to sit through hundreds of hours of mind-numbingly boring history classes (it's not history's fault!), I've got a huge chunk of "general everyday knowledge" missing that even the thickest of Japanese seem to have, and real books on history tend to be aimed at history nerds, so the language is pretty complex to begin with. All that means is I just have to rely on my resources a lot more than the average person does, and I assume the "general everyday knowledge" part will come to me eventually, albeit little by little.

In the meantime, I occasionally get really excited about things that turn out to be rather mundane.

On my way home from a friend's Japanese wedding reception party ("Japanese" here means "get as drunk as you can in the allotted two hours, or you might as well not go at all") I was passing through 市ヶ谷駅 Ichigaya station and I came across the 江戸歴史散歩コーナー Edo Period Historic Walk Corner, which looks like a big rock wall, a bunch of pictures with some maps, and a little display of the area above and outside the station. I didn't really have time to sit and digest all of the information at once so I took some pictures with the intention of reviewing them all at home, but what I saw got me excited. There were pictures of markings that looked like the kind of symbols you expect prehistoric man to write; triangles, circles, X's and O's. They weren't arranged into sentences or words, but could this possibly be an attempt at communication by a prehistoric Japanese civilization? I thought. I should have realized how silly that was considering that some of the symbols were actually on display in the open for you to touch, and that the whole corner was dedicated to the Edo period; not exactly "prehistory".

So anyway, I took the pictures home and did a little searching. The "stone wall" was actually a modern creation; Ichigaya station was built in an area close to where the old Edo castle used to stand, and a lot of the "bricks" used in its many walls were dug up. These bricks were then used to demonstrate the methods used by Edo period stonemasons in their wall making. The "markings" were actually some sort of branding used by the stonemasons to identify where the stones were coming from and/or who had cut them out, which explains why some of the markings resemble characters used in people and place names.

It's still nice to see some attempt at beautifying the inside of a subway station with something more than blue LEDs and pink tiles. Props to the guy who OK'd the project, I guess. Now if they'd only stop destroying everything old in the first place maybe there'd be more to look at underground, ay?