Pen/Insular_Notes

Via Kerim comes this post from Pinyin News on the shapes of Japanese colonial administration buildings in Taiwan which uses Google Earth to show the very clear 日 shape (as in 日本 meaning Japan) of the presidential building and the cabinet building in Tapei. Seems the nationalists got their own back by building Taipei City Hall in the shape of 十十 (two tens).

This is interesting as a commenter on the previous post mentioned that he found it odd that Koreans would traditionally gather to support their national football team outside the colonial era City Hall in Seoul. Now, I’m not sure about the shape of the city hall but no Korean will hesitate to inform you of the fact that the now-demolished former General Government building was also built using the 日 sun character shape (and apparently designed by a German architect). Since it was built on part of the Chosŏn king’s main palace it was quite literally a case of stamping Japanese authority onto the political space of the capital. I wonder whether other Japanese colonial-era buildings in Seoul were built in the shape of particular Chinese characters. Another thing that fascinates me is the orgins of this practice of writing with buildings (archigraphy?). Is there a precedent for making buildings appear like characters from above in premodern Chinese history? Or did the Japanese come up with this strange habit in the Meiji period?

Clearly this shows there is some benefit to having a name for your country that uses nice simple characters. Try designing a building using the character 韓.

Addendum:
I’ve just discovered that Andrei Lankov wrote one of his regular pieces for the Korea Times on the subject of the Japanese General Government building in Seoul. While reading it I managed to get side-tracked into another linguistic issue. He mentions that the Japanese intellectual Yanagi Mineyoshi who saved parts of the Kyŏngbokkung palace from being destroyed to make way for the building was thought by the Japanese authorities to be an ethnic Korean because “the Chinese characters for his name, unlike most Japanese names, do appear in Korean”. This is a confusing statement, but what he obviously means is that because of the characters used in Yanagi’s name it could be a Korean name, and this is indeed the case. Looking at the Naver encyclopedia entry on Yanagi we can see that his name would be pronounced Yu Chong-yŏl (柳宗悅) in Korean and the surname Yanagi/Yu, meaning willow, is also a surname in Korea (in fact, according to the surname reference page in Bruce K Grant’s dictionary, it’s the seventh most common surname in Korea).