Japanese Politics

In the posting below, done last night, I mentioned that here in Auckland I am enjoying watching NHK, a Japanese television channel, similar to the BBC in quality.

There are elections coming up in Japan, and this screen has something to do with those.

I can't read what this says, my Japanese daughter-in-law kindly translated it for me.

I have photographed it just because I like the shapes, colours, the overall effect of it. Probably it would not be possible to fully explain why I am attracted arrangements of shapes like this.

I did appreciate more fully, when Michiko was translating, however, that she was using the pictorial nature of this script to give her clues to the meaning. And I also appreciated how they must find reading English difficult, it having no picture clues at all in the words. Reading this script must require two different parts of the brain. They are not trying to crack the meaning of the word just by sounding it out alone as we do.

Incidentally, there are about 40,000 of these kanji.

And I should add that the little bit of simpler writing in the lower middle of the picture is katakana, which are the shapes Japanese use to write English words. Derived from kanji they are though, largely phonetic.