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I find it hard to believe that they copied the word for workshop (presumably 工房) convincingly enough that it wasn't obviously written by someone without any und

I find it hard to believe that they copied the word for workshop (presumably 工房) convincingly enough that it wasn't obviously written by someone without any understanding of how to actually write the language. It's extremely obvious when someone tries to copy Chinese characters without any understanding of stroke order, stroke pressure, etc. The way that someone would show how a character looks to someone without any knowledge (ie textbook form) and how they would naturally write such a sign is also different. You would be able to tell instantly that a non-native prisoner wrote it. Actually, signs were also written right-to-left horizontally during that period but it's likely that someone showing them how to write on a piece of paper would have written vertically, so they would probably not even have the knowledge to know the correct order of the text.

iaseiadit 2y ago
If all signs in the prison camp were written right-to-left instead of vertically, they probably would have noted that before creating the sign. Especially considering their lives depended on it.
- teshigahara 2y ago
  If you can't read the signs how would you know it's right-to-left? You are only seeing two unknown characters, you don't know which comes first. It's not about vertical vs horizontal. It's that someone who speaks English would assume that all of these signs they can't read are written left-to-right, and write the vertical characters they are copying in the wrong order.
  - j16sdiz 2y ago
    You knew it is rtl when you see a paragraph is aligned to right
    - teshigahara 2y ago
      No, this doesn't make sense in the context of Japanese. One of these signs is written right to left: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQdiwLYNl2CfqsQuFSXXSYMyo_hfAVWT3cJpQ3aOQTs_g&s https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQdiwLY... https://auctions.afimg.jp/h1085974646/ya/image/h1085974646.2.jpg https://auctions.afimg.jp/h1085974646/ya/image/h1085974646.2... Which one is it? There is no way to tell unless you already know the characters. Unless someone could read the existing signs they would almost certainly assume they were left-to-right and make any new sign like that if they only had the characters to copy.
      - freeopinion 2y ago
        I appreciate what you are pointing out here. I agree with you that getting it just right would be a challenge. Did you happen to see the lathe? I ask you, which would be more difficult to get right in the smallest detail? While most Allied soldiers would not be literate in Japanese, that doesn't mean they would all be completely ignorant, either. It just takes one to know enough to ask about character order. While I agree that it was high risk, I'm willing to believe the people who were present when they say they pulled it off. Sometimes we dodge bullets without even knowing they were fired.
        livueta 2y ago
        As someone who both a) does precision fab work as a hobby and b) made the somewhat unfortunate decision to memorize many thousands of kanji without caring about stroke order: it's harder. Sorry. 100% agree with the parent: even though I can read Japanese at a fairly advanced level, having not properly learned stroke order is a massive bitch. I can't handwrite for shit, and that's obvious to me and anyone else who can read Japanese of any degree of complexity. It is so many orders of difficulty above "ask[ing] about character order" that I can't even begin to verbalize what a category difference of difficulty it is. Handwriting Japanese that looks correct to a native reader assumes years of naturalization.
        freeopinion 2y ago
  - fenomas 2y ago
    This is such a facially bizarre thing to contest. They got a Japanese NCO to write the text, and presumably copied it as he wrote it. Why imagine that the NCO wrote it vertically and the soldiers horizontally? Likewise the article doesn't suggest that anyone thought the sign was written by a native speaker; why even imagine that's a requirement? I mean, consider this in the abstract - the objections you're making here rest on the implicit assumption that you know more about the realities of life in a Japanese POW camp than TFA's author. (After all, if he fabricated the story about the sign he'd obviously fabricate it so as to be consistent with his experiences in the camp.) Do you really think that premise is more likely than the alternative - that TFA's extremely brief telling of the story simply doesn't include whatever details would answer your objections?
    - kybernetikos 2y ago
      Most likely the circumstance they got the Japanese NCO to write the text in was a conversation about learning Japanese and how to write it too. Nobody is deliberately trying to stop them from learning to write, they are most likely in favour of it, the trickiness was just around avoiding the Japanese running the camp from noticing their interest in workshops specifically. If stroke order is important in this context then I expect the Japanese NCO showing them the characters would have told them and explained the proper order.
      - fenomas 2y ago
        I don't think the writing matters a whit. The only premise the story depends on is: that the camp guards saw the workshop and took it for granted that it was approved by somebody, since it was orderly and operating openly. If you accept that, it doesn't matter if the sign was amateurish or even upside-down - it would just look like something the workers had been told to make, or had made themselves to test the tools or to pass the time. A bunch of posters here seem to be imagining that the sign was the lone keystone of the ruse, and that for some reason it needed to look like it was written by a native speaker or else the whole plan toppled. But nothing in TFA suggests that, it just says the sign was one of several things the POWs did to make the whole setup look like it had approval to be there.
simonh 2y ago
For handwriting sure, but print characters as for a sign would be easier.
- brazzy 2y ago
  How would they print a sign?
  - krisoft 2y ago
    “Print characters” is a style of the characters. You can still hand paint them, they don’t have to be printed to be in that style. Look at this image for example: https://www.ideastream.org/community/2022-09-01/making-it-old-soul-sign-co-hand-paints-vintage-signs-with-a-modern-twist https://www.ideastream.org/community/2022-09-01/making-it-ol... That is clearly a hand painted letter but is using a printed style (as opposed to a cursive one) Japanese writing has the same distinction. These letters on the sign are in printed style: https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanesepod101/3706680254/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanesepod101/3706680254/ The shapes are simplified and regularised. Compared with these caligraphy style letters: https://www.flickr.com/photos/12567713@N00/70734240/in/photostream/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/12567713@N00/70734240/in/photo...
    - teshigahara 2y ago
      "Print characters" aren't hand painted on signs and you will rarely see it written in any context outside of extremely old books. There's no such thing as "print characters", anyway. Presumably you are referring to 明朝体 (although that sign you linked is actually 丸ゴシック, which is much more recent). Besides, even if it was written down like that it will still be incredibly obvious. It would be like if you had your child try to copy Times New Roman and pass it off as the real thing. It's actually harder than writing normally unless you have a stencil.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - 2y ago
eszed 2y ago
And yet it worked.... Your knowledge of Japanese orthography gives you an interesting perspective. I'd be fascinated to know, given the obstacles you note, how exactly the prisoners overcame them. Did they have someone in the camp with basic knowledge of Chinese orthography? Did someone know enough to note carefully the way in which the characters were written? Did they keep the paper with the characters on it, and then hand-reproduce the precise structure? Were the guards generally illiterate, and therefore not notice the errors? All of those would be spurs to further research, which your reflexive dismissal of the premise would preclude. An open-minded approach to historical texts usually generates more-interesting questions and answers than a closed one.
- nxicvyvy 2y ago
  Or do the guards just not want to speak out of line or question their superiors. Or do the guards all know but don't care because things are being fixed up around the place. Or are all the signs in the camp created by prisoners? So much is unknown about the situation to make the claims made above.
  - riehwvfbk 2y ago
    Or another (and I think the most likely possibility, given what we know about human nature): one of the guards ran a profitable little side business selling basic machined parts in town made with free labor. In exchange, the prisoners got to make stuff they needed also. Only the high-ranking prisoners were in on the scheme. The rest were told the story about "deception", which is what we see relayed here.
    - smabie 2y ago
      You literally just made this up and you say it's the most likely explanation?
      - riehwvfbk 2y ago
        The other explanation is a little too much like a comic book. Real life tends not to resemble Batman storylines. I mean, it's a great feel-good story and we want to believe it. Americans oh-so-smart, their Japanese captors as dumb as Darth Vader's henchmen, the perfect setting, and the machine shop was used to produce prosthetics. It's so saccharine my teeth hurt.
sidewndr46 2y ago
It's a prisoner of war camp. All the signs are made by prisoners.
- teshigahara 2y ago
  It would be much easier for a random Japanese soldier who actually knows the language to just write on the few necessary signs than trying to direct a prisoner to do so, who will probably end up making mistakes and make it almost illegible. This just sounds like a nice explanation but it's unlikely to be the case.
  - marshray 2y ago
    I'd be kinda surprised if they let outsiders do their calligraphy for them.
brazzy 2y ago
I had the same thought, but as the other responses note, there are many possible explanations. Yet another one: maybe some of the prisoners actually knew basic Japanese? It would be a very useful skill in their situation, and learning the basics of how to write kanji is not that hard. It wouldn't be calligraphy, but it just needs to look good enough that it might just be sloppy writing.
OJFord 2y ago
> obviously written by someone without any understanding of how to actually write the language. It's extremely obvious when someone tries to copy Chinese characters without any understanding of stroke order, stroke pressure, etc. Or someone who is not a professional wooden sign carver, perhaps? I'm natively familiar with English writing, but if I carved 'workshop' I'm not sure it would look any better than someone imitating me, nor obviously like I'd used correct 'stroke' order. > You would be able to tell instantly that a non-native prisoner wrote it. And that might not be suspicious at all anyway?
solidsnack9000 2y ago
What if most of the signs in the camp were already made by the prisoners?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

iaseiadit 2y ago

If all signs in the prison camp were written right-to-left instead of vertically, they probably would have noted that before creating the sign. Especially considering their lives depended on it.

teshigahara 2y ago
If you can't read the signs how would you know it's right-to-left? You are only seeing two unknown characters, you don't know which comes first. It's not about vertical vs horizontal. It's that someone who speaks English would assume that all of these signs they can't read are written left-to-right, and write the vertical characters they are copying in the wrong order.
- j16sdiz 2y ago
  You knew it is rtl when you see a paragraph is aligned to right
  - teshigahara 2y ago
    No, this doesn't make sense in the context of Japanese. One of these signs is written right to left: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQdiwLYNl2CfqsQuFSXXSYMyo_hfAVWT3cJpQ3aOQTs_g&s https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQdiwLY... https://auctions.afimg.jp/h1085974646/ya/image/h1085974646.2.jpg https://auctions.afimg.jp/h1085974646/ya/image/h1085974646.2... Which one is it? There is no way to tell unless you already know the characters. Unless someone could read the existing signs they would almost certainly assume they were left-to-right and make any new sign like that if they only had the characters to copy.
    - freeopinion 2y ago
      I appreciate what you are pointing out here. I agree with you that getting it just right would be a challenge. Did you happen to see the lathe? I ask you, which would be more difficult to get right in the smallest detail? While most Allied soldiers would not be literate in Japanese, that doesn't mean they would all be completely ignorant, either. It just takes one to know enough to ask about character order. While I agree that it was high risk, I'm willing to believe the people who were present when they say they pulled it off. Sometimes we dodge bullets without even knowing they were fired.
      - livueta 2y ago
        As someone who both a) does precision fab work as a hobby and b) made the somewhat unfortunate decision to memorize many thousands of kanji without caring about stroke order: it's harder. Sorry. 100% agree with the parent: even though I can read Japanese at a fairly advanced level, having not properly learned stroke order is a massive bitch. I can't handwrite for shit, and that's obvious to me and anyone else who can read Japanese of any degree of complexity. It is so many orders of difficulty above "ask[ing] about character order" that I can't even begin to verbalize what a category difference of difficulty it is. Handwriting Japanese that looks correct to a native reader assumes years of naturalization.
        freeopinion 2y ago
- fenomas 2y ago
  This is such a facially bizarre thing to contest. They got a Japanese NCO to write the text, and presumably copied it as he wrote it. Why imagine that the NCO wrote it vertically and the soldiers horizontally? Likewise the article doesn't suggest that anyone thought the sign was written by a native speaker; why even imagine that's a requirement? I mean, consider this in the abstract - the objections you're making here rest on the implicit assumption that you know more about the realities of life in a Japanese POW camp than TFA's author. (After all, if he fabricated the story about the sign he'd obviously fabricate it so as to be consistent with his experiences in the camp.) Do you really think that premise is more likely than the alternative - that TFA's extremely brief telling of the story simply doesn't include whatever details would answer your objections?
  - kybernetikos 2y ago
    Most likely the circumstance they got the Japanese NCO to write the text in was a conversation about learning Japanese and how to write it too. Nobody is deliberately trying to stop them from learning to write, they are most likely in favour of it, the trickiness was just around avoiding the Japanese running the camp from noticing their interest in workshops specifically. If stroke order is important in this context then I expect the Japanese NCO showing them the characters would have told them and explained the proper order.
    - fenomas 2y ago
      I don't think the writing matters a whit. The only premise the story depends on is: that the camp guards saw the workshop and took it for granted that it was approved by somebody, since it was orderly and operating openly. If you accept that, it doesn't matter if the sign was amateurish or even upside-down - it would just look like something the workers had been told to make, or had made themselves to test the tools or to pass the time. A bunch of posters here seem to be imagining that the sign was the lone keystone of the ruse, and that for some reason it needed to look like it was written by a native speaker or else the whole plan toppled. But nothing in TFA suggests that, it just says the sign was one of several things the POWs did to make the whole setup look like it had approval to be there.

simonh 2y ago

For handwriting sure, but print characters as for a sign would be easier.

brazzy 2y ago
How would they print a sign?
- krisoft 2y ago
  “Print characters” is a style of the characters. You can still hand paint them, they don’t have to be printed to be in that style. Look at this image for example: https://www.ideastream.org/community/2022-09-01/making-it-old-soul-sign-co-hand-paints-vintage-signs-with-a-modern-twist https://www.ideastream.org/community/2022-09-01/making-it-ol... That is clearly a hand painted letter but is using a printed style (as opposed to a cursive one) Japanese writing has the same distinction. These letters on the sign are in printed style: https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanesepod101/3706680254/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanesepod101/3706680254/ The shapes are simplified and regularised. Compared with these caligraphy style letters: https://www.flickr.com/photos/12567713@N00/70734240/in/photostream/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/12567713@N00/70734240/in/photo...
  - teshigahara 2y ago
    "Print characters" aren't hand painted on signs and you will rarely see it written in any context outside of extremely old books. There's no such thing as "print characters", anyway. Presumably you are referring to 明朝体 (although that sign you linked is actually 丸ゴシック, which is much more recent). Besides, even if it was written down like that it will still be incredibly obvious. It would be like if you had your child try to copy Times New Roman and pass it off as the real thing. It's actually harder than writing normally unless you have a stencil.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - 2y ago

eszed 2y ago

And yet it worked.... Your knowledge of Japanese orthography gives you an interesting perspective. I'd be fascinated to know, given the obstacles you note, how exactly the prisoners overcame them. Did they have someone in the camp with basic knowledge of Chinese orthography? Did someone know enough to note carefully the way in which the characters were written? Did they keep the paper with the characters on it, and then hand-reproduce the precise structure? Were the guards generally illiterate, and therefore not notice the errors? All of those would be spurs to further research, which your reflexive dismissal of the premise would preclude. An open-minded approach to historical texts usually generates more-interesting questions and answers than a closed one.

nxicvyvy 2y ago
Or do the guards just not want to speak out of line or question their superiors. Or do the guards all know but don't care because things are being fixed up around the place. Or are all the signs in the camp created by prisoners? So much is unknown about the situation to make the claims made above.
- riehwvfbk 2y ago
  Or another (and I think the most likely possibility, given what we know about human nature): one of the guards ran a profitable little side business selling basic machined parts in town made with free labor. In exchange, the prisoners got to make stuff they needed also. Only the high-ranking prisoners were in on the scheme. The rest were told the story about "deception", which is what we see relayed here.
  - smabie 2y ago
    You literally just made this up and you say it's the most likely explanation?
    - riehwvfbk 2y ago
      The other explanation is a little too much like a comic book. Real life tends not to resemble Batman storylines. I mean, it's a great feel-good story and we want to believe it. Americans oh-so-smart, their Japanese captors as dumb as Darth Vader's henchmen, the perfect setting, and the machine shop was used to produce prosthetics. It's so saccharine my teeth hurt.

sidewndr46 2y ago

It's a prisoner of war camp. All the signs are made by prisoners.

teshigahara 2y ago
It would be much easier for a random Japanese soldier who actually knows the language to just write on the few necessary signs than trying to direct a prisoner to do so, who will probably end up making mistakes and make it almost illegible. This just sounds like a nice explanation but it's unlikely to be the case.
- marshray 2y ago
  I'd be kinda surprised if they let outsiders do their calligraphy for them.

brazzy 2y ago

I had the same thought, but as the other responses note, there are many possible explanations. Yet another one: maybe some of the prisoners actually knew basic Japanese? It would be a very useful skill in their situation, and learning the basics of how to write kanji is not that hard. It wouldn't be calligraphy, but it just needs to look good enough that it might just be sloppy writing.

OJFord 2y ago

> obviously written by someone without any understanding of how to actually write the language. It's extremely obvious when someone tries to copy Chinese characters without any understanding of stroke order, stroke pressure, etc. Or someone who is not a professional wooden sign carver, perhaps? I'm natively familiar with English writing, but if I carved 'workshop' I'm not sure it would look any better than someone imitating me, nor obviously like I'd used correct 'stroke' order. > You would be able to tell instantly that a non-native prisoner wrote it. And that might not be suspicious at all anyway?

solidsnack9000 2y ago

What if most of the signs in the camp were already made by the prisoners?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]