My Take on a Womb-a-Snatching Yoji

Did you ever watch a show and think, hey I've seen this plot before! Are all writers hacks these days or what? Well hack is an appropriate word as you will see when I dissect tonight's yoji in a macabre fashion just in time for halloween!

換骨奪胎 kannkotsudattai Breakdown:

換 kan: change
骨 kotsu: bones
奪 da(tsu): rob
胎 tai: womb (embryo)
gloss: adaptation of a previous creative work
part of speech: noun, suru verb

Change the bones, rob the womb? Yup. Make a frankensteinian monster and call it art! We only have so many ideas to go around anyways.

The recollection collection of a monk, one Eko of the Song dynasty, entitled 冷斎夜話 (reisaiyawa, Uncle Eko's Bathroom Reader of uh... Cold and Holy Trivia?) gave us this word's genesis about 1,000 years ago. It says,

その意を易（か）えずしてその語を造る、これを換骨法という。
Without changing the meaning, make that story. This is the bone-change way.

その意を規範（きはん）（手本）としてこれを形容す、これを奪胎法という
Using that meaning as your model, make a form. This is the steal-womb way.

[source] Well, thank goodness they spelled that out for us, or I wouldn't know what to steal and what to change.

Of course, examples of 換骨奪胎 are all around us. For instance, the American adaptation of Ringu may be considered one. A cool one I ran into recently is the GiantRobo remake, which in turn inspired The Big O (the ultimate 換骨奪胎 anime). Here's the intro:

If you are looking for more Halloween yoji, may I suggest the mountains of blood one. Also, I just added the Ancient Chinese Secrets tag to the blog. Check out those secrets to clean the blood out your clothes after you literally interpret this post.

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Let's Yoji: Scholars and Wars

They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but I say them's fighting words! In this post, I'll cover 3 slightly related four character Japanese compounds that I found interesting which all came from war and philosophy-torn ancient China.

The first is 諸子百家. Let's break it down!

諸子百家 Breakdown:
諸 sho: many, various, all
子 shi: founder of a branch of philosophical thought (as seen in Koushi, Confucius)
諸子: Chinese sages and philosophers
百 hyak: 100
家 ka: ~er person
百家: many scholars
shoshihyakka gloss: The Hundred Schools of Thought

A list I've semi-translated below from yahoo dic says schools that participated in the great philosophy explosion that was this event included Confucianists（Confucious・Mencius）, Taoists（Lao-tzu・荘子）, Mohismists（Mozi）, Legalists（管仲・商鞅(しょうおう)）, Logicians（公孫竜）War Philosophers,（Sun Tzu・呉子）Diplomatists（蘇秦(そしん)・張儀）, Ying-yangists, Complicatedists, farmwithinyourmeansists, and gossip/tale gatherers (there was actual office in ancient China for gossip gathering).

Okay, that doesn't work very well as a traditional idiomatic yojijukugo, but it helps one to understand 百家争鳴

百家争鳴 breakdown:
争 sou: dispute
鳴 mei: sound off
hyakkasoumei gloss: Many opinions freely being exchanged

Now, it's not so common but I did find it in an article post:

iPhone 4のRetinaをめぐり百家争鳴！誇大広告なの？
=Is the iPhone 4's Retina [display] being falsely advertised? The pundits are sounding off!

Anyways, this yoji comes out of the Hundred Schools of thought period and the wealth of different opinions that were floating around back then. Interestingly, the Chinese government used it in 1956 along with the phrase "Let a hundred flowers bloom" (Chinese:百花運動 Japanese:百花斉放) to encourage debate in the political arena. Some people think it was just to find political dissidents. Mao started it and then shut the sumbich down when people actually used their freedom of speech that he had so graciously given them. We'll talk a little more about a tyrannical ruler with the next yoji, 酒池肉林, below!

酒池肉林 breakdown:
酒 shu: libations
池 chi: pond
肉 niku: meat
林 rin: woods
shuchinikurin gloss: A banquet with rivers of beer and mountains of food, a decadent feast

This one is also from China, and had a debaucherous context. See ol' king Zhou of Shag (posthumously named King Crupper) liked to line his pool (池) with alcohol and canoe around in it while plucking meat from shish kebab trees (林) . Sometimes he watched his enemies fried alive to work up an appetite for a good orgy. He's known as the worst king that China ever had. I encountered him in a game I play called Dynasty Warriors and he utters his famous yoji every time you successfully and satisfyingly kill him.

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Let's Yoji: What I Know About Coins Makes Me Rich

During a wiki-surfing session, I ran across a pic of this hand purifying basin, or tsukubai, and learned that the characters meet up with the middle hole, which is shaped like the kanji/radical for mouth (口), to make new kanji. Then those kanji make a sentence. Brilliant!

Totally Profound Yoji Breakdown Go!
五 (five)+口= 吾 ware (I)
止 (stop)+口= 足 taru (sufficient)
隹 (bird)+口= 唯 tada (just/only)
矢 (arrow)+口= 知 shiru (know)

put them all together as a 4 character idiom and you get:
吾唯足知 or 吾唯足るを知る ware tada taru wo shiru which means I am content with just what I have.

I found a page with a couple of follow up idioms that one may have learned back in the day if they hung around the temple with this profound basin. They are:
知足の者は賤しとも雖も富めり Those that live within their means are rich even when destitute.
and
不知足の者は富めりと雖も賤し Those that live beyond their means, even when blessed with riches, are bereft.

Notice the liberties I took with 賤しい iyashii (greedy, vulgar, shabby, humble, base, mean, vile). You can probably think of a better way to put it, but I am 不知 fuchi (an ignoramus.) By the way, there seems to be a connection of some sort between these two idioms and what Lao Tzu said in the 33rd chapter of his book, How to Make a Blog Post Long, Erudite, and Boring: 足るを知る者は富む To be satisfied with one's lot in life is to be rich.

Okay, are you still with me? Because I wanted to discuss one more thing. You see, I thought I had seen a coin with the same characters as the basin at the top of this post. Turns out that such coins are not currency, but novelty items for sale in some areas, and that I was thinking of the Zenigata's 寛永通宝 kan'eitsūhō (Kan'ei era coins). Their names match the characters on them as you can see in the following pic.



Now the word just said, zenigata, may ring a bell with you. The word was even payed some homage by a Lupin character. Zenigata (coin shape) is part of the title to a series of books, plays, and dramas about an Edo period detective named Heiji that throws coins at bad guys. Somehow that works. Thus the series is called 銭形平次 Zenigata Heiji.

I will leave you with a video from the Zenigata series. Watch for coin throwing and use this vid to practice karaoke. After people get so wowed by you knowing this song that they start throwing money and kisses, you can pull out all the awesome knowledge you got from this post and really impress the crowd. But don't get cocky; know your limit.

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Followup: Why is 仙台 Named so Strangely?

Yesterday I neglected to include 仙台 (Sendai, a city in Japan) in the magical hermit post*, because I thought it didn't match at all. But when Alex brought it up in the comments, I decided to look in Wikipedia. It says,

At this time, Sendai was written as 千代 (which literally means "a thousand generations"), because a temple with a thousand Buddha statues (千体, sentai) used to be located in Aobayama. Masamune changed the kanji to 仙臺, which later became 仙台 (which literally means "hermit on a platform"). The kanji was taken from a Chinese poem that praised a palace created by the Emperor Wen of Han China, comparing it to a mythical palace in the Kunlun Mountains. It is said that Masamune chose this kanji so that the castle would prosper as long as a mountain inhabited by an immortal hermit.

Turns out that the city's name has a pretty cool back story after all. Learning gets.

BTW on the kanji above, 体 is a counter for humanoid forms, such as statues. 臺 is just the old form of 台.
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* Magical hermit post is so the next blogging craze.

Japanese they don't teach: Hermits

I've been studying a lot lately, and during my breaks I often spend a few minutes (and I do try to keep it to just a few) exercising lightly or playing old Japanese SNES games to let my brain rest a bit. A recent game I've been into is a fung shui room builder/RPG called Chaos Seed which is kind of... unique. Anyways, I noticed the kanji 仙 (sen) gets thrown around a lot, so I thought I would tell you about some of it's uses that I found.

First off, its basic meaning is hermit, which in Asian culture seems to also mean wizard or immortal. I recall finding when I read about a mosaic at a Bangkok palace that within the omnipresent monkey king-related traditions of Asia, hermits seem to crop up a lot and they often have magical powers. I think it's the influence of ancient Taoism with its immortals. Immortals, like hermits, often dwell in the mountains, so I think this is why they are equivocated. This is all my armchair-summation of Asian mysticism, but I think I got the gist of it.

So here are some of the interesting words I found after 仙 started to intrigue me:

◆ 仙人 [sen'nin] (n) (1) immortal mountain wizard (in Taoism), mountain man (esp. a hermit), (2) one not bound by earthly desires or the thoughts of normal men.
◆ 仙窟 [senkutsu] (n) enchanted cave
◆ 仙女 [senjyo] [sen'nyu] [sen'nyo](n) fairy, nymph, elf
◆ 仙丹 [sentan] (n) the elixir (of life) [there's that immortality I'm talking about]
◆ 仙薬 [senyaku] (n) panacea, elixir (of life)
◆ 仙境 [senkyou] or 仙郷 [senkyou] (n) fairyland, enchanted land
◆ 仙術 [senjyutsu] (n) wizardry, secret of immortality
◆ 仙界 [senkai] (n) dwelling place of hermits, pure land away from the world
◆ 登仙 [tousen] (n,vs) becoming a saint, death of a high-ranking person
◆ 羽化登仙 [ukatousen] (n) a sense of release (as if one had wings and were riding on air)
◆ 神仙 [shisen] (n) (1) mountain wizard, god

A couple that don't have much to do with the running theme:

◆ 歌仙 [kasen] or 詩仙 [shisen] (n) great poet
◆ 酒仙 [shusen] (n) heavy drinker [drunken master? Nah, that would be 酔拳 (すいけん, drunken fist)]

I also found talk of the 八仙 (hassen, the eight immortals) on Wikipedia. They remind me of the 七福神 (shichifukujin, seven gods of good luck) of Japan. Oh and speaking of them, once I made a mistake asked an old lady shopkeep how much her 七面鳥 (shichimenchou, meaning turkey, which quite far from a god of luck) figurines cost. We had a good laugh at that.

If you are in term overload, maybe this movie about immortals will recharge your brain. It's like a Chinese lord of the rings.


And yes, there are more parts to this movie on YouTube. I recently found the whole thing here.


EDIT: Hope you didn't miss the follow-up post.

Kyounshi (Hopping Vampire) Boom Classic Promo Vid

Had an interesting day today at the school. We held a barbecue and later I introduced the Chinese students to some videos of my favorite Kung-fu practitioner, Sammo Hung. This led into my favorite Kung-fu movie, Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind, which then led into discussion with a teacher of the Kyounshi Boom in the 80s.
So here is a video promo intended for Japanese people of some very odd Chinese flicks from that time and genre.


The Narrator's comments are pretty funny. "The Hong Kong Highlander!" "Can you read this character?" "They do ecchi too..." "A car comes at us!"

Now I must waste some time watching Mr. Vampire.