A couple more entries in the shiritori word game.
First up, Uda-san posts a vignette of figure-skater Mao Asada receiving a bag full of LEGO goodies from a fan:
Nigou continues the game, from Uda-san’s Mao Asada to her sweet-potato vendor’s cart (manned by Hagrid). These vendors sell sweet-potatoes baked on a bed of red-hot stones. Today, they most often drive around in little trucks, with their oven on the back, so these traditional carts are a rare sight:
The name Nelson Yrizarry should be familar to regular readers of VignetteBricks and LUGNET (as well as The Brothers Brick). He and his brother Patrick are well-respected members of the LEGO community, and their creations are admired by LEGO fans everywhere. One of Nelson’s latest vignettes features a distinctly Japanese theme — the Hina Matsuri or Girls’ Day Festival.
Here’s what Nelson has to say:
In this MOC, a family gathers to celebrate the day with the pounding of mochi (rice cakes) in the traditional style – hammering it inside a large stone bowl. For those who have never seen this before, one person wets their hands and reaches into the bowl between hammer blows to fold the mochi over – timing is crucial! Everyone else helps to roll the mochi into smaller pieces.
A hina-ningyo doll is on display inside the house, along with something else… Don’t forget to enjoy the cherry blossoms!
Click the image to see the full gallery.
Today we’ll wrap up translations of Izzo’s series of Japanese proverb vignettes. I’ve said before that he’s presenting them in hiragana order, which means he created a LEGO vignette for each kana character in the Japanese syllabic alphabet. Some of you may be expecting 50 vignettes, but there are only 44. Let’s have one last Japanese lesson to explain why.
The Japanese alphabet, or Gojuon, is represented in two scripts (or kana), hiragana and katakana. Goju means “fifty,” and on means sound, implying that there are fifty kana in the Gojuon. Children memorize the Gojuon in tables. There are ten columns of five kana each. The first column contains the vowels; the next nine contain consonants combined with those vowels (plus an N sound in its own eleventh column that nobody counts). However, the “Ya” column includes two duplicate vowels, and the “Wa” column includes another duplicate vowel, two archaic kana (unused in modern writing), and the vowel “Wo” that never begins a word. Thus 44 instead of 50.
(Now combine hiragana with their corresponding katakana forms, Latin letters and numbers, and nearly 2,000 Kanji characters derived from Chinese — each with multiple possible readings depending on context, and you get an idea of how complex the Japanese written language is.)
Now, on to the final batch of Izzo’s vignettes:
Japanese: The seed of pleasure is pain; the seed of pain is pleasure.
English: No pain, no gain.
Japanese: A flower in each hand.
English: Have one’s bread buttered on both sides.
Japanese/English: Like attracts like.
Japanese/English: There’s an exception to every rule.
Japanese: Evidence instead of discourse.
English: The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Japanese/English: Fortune enters by a merry gate.
Izzo has finished his sequence of Japanese proverb vignettes. Now Bruce and I just need to catch up!
So let’s get cracking!
Japanese/Japanese: Fine feathers make fine birds.
Japanese: The mummy thief becomes a mummy.
English: Go for wool and come home shorn.
Japanese: The pestle handle I took hold of in the past.
English: Skills you learn as a young man don’t wane as you grow older.
Japanese/English: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
Japanese: A sword returns to its sheath.
English: To kiss and make up.
Japanese/English: Penny-wise, pound-foolish.
Japanese: Carelessness is the greatest enemy.
English: Danger comes when you least expect it.
Japanese/English: The biggest trees give the most shelter.
As regular readers of Pan-Pacific Bricks and VignetteBricks already know, Izzo has been posting LEGO vignettes based on Japanese proverbs. So far, Izzo has posted 30 vignettes on his Web site and in two Brickshelf galleries. I’ve translated the first twenty, and am genuinely looking forward to the next thirty. How do I know there are going to be thirty more? Izzo is posting the proverb vignettes in hiragana order, and there are approximately fifty hiragana characters.
So let’s get started with the next ten, shall we? :-)
Japanese: A bee to a crying face.
English: Misfortunes never come alone. / When it rains, it pours.
Japanese/English: He who runs after two hares will catch neither.
Japanese: Millet with wet hands.
English:Like taking candy from a baby. / Easy money.
Japanese: Wearing a cat.
English: A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Japanese/English: There’s luck in leftovers. (“Luck” sounds the same as “clothing,” so there’s a pun in this one as well.)
Japanese: Dumplings rather than flowers.
English: Function before form. / Better fill a man’s belly than his eye.
Japanese: Beauty and luck seldom go together.
English: The fairest flowers soonest fade.
Japanese/English: Candle in the wind. (To have one’s life hang by a thread.)
Japanese/English: He that shoots oft, at last shall hit the mark.
Japanese: If you’re in love, travelling a thousand miles seems like only one mile.
English: Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Bruce has posted again that Izzo has posted another batch of Japanese proverb vignettes in his gallery.
Here we go…
Japanese: Strategem 36: If all else fails, run away.
English: He that fights and runs away lives to see another day.
Japanese/English: Dead men tell no tales.
Japanese: When one god deserts you, another one picks you up.
English: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Japanese/English: Good and quickly seldom meet.
(It’s a fast-food noodle stand. Not exactly gourmet cooking.)
Japanese: Providing is preventing.
English: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
(In other words, always be prepared. Thus the Swiss Army robot.)
Japanese: A bird taking flight does not pollute the place it left.
English: It is an ill bird that fouls its own nest.
Japanese: Even dust piled up will make a mountain.
English: Many a little makes a mickle.
Japanese: The moon and a soft-shell turtle.
English: As different as night and day.
Japanese/English: The nail which sticks out gets hammered down.
Japanese/English: A near neighbour is better than a far-dwelling kinsman.
As before, check out Izzo’s if you want to see Flash versions that include the original Japanese text.
Or so it would seem, based on the recent spate of overweight minifigs (see “Fat Minifig by Mister Zumbi“).
Now Nelson Yrizarry has posted “Couch Potato,” captioned “Disaster strikes as Fatboy drops the TV remote:”
I just saw that Bruce posted about a new set of vignettes by Izzo (whose New Year’s creations I posted about earlier this month). Quoth Bruce: “Hopefully Dunechaser will be able to shed some enlightenment via his Pan-Pacific Bricks blog.” Well sir, I shall give it my best shot.
Here’s what I’ll do. The vignettes won’t make sense unless you understand exactly what the Japanese proverbs say, but you still might not get what the proverbs actually mean, so I’ll try to find a corresponding English proverb or provide a brief explanation.
Japanese: By hiding your head you expose your butt.
English: Burying your head in the sand.
Japanese: Even a one-sun bug has a five-bu soul.
(Sun and bu are units of length that are no longer used in Japan, where the Metric system is used instead. There are ten sun in one bu, so this proverb is saying that even a little bug has a big soul.)
English: Tread on a worm and it will turn.
Japanese: If you gossip about someone, their shadow will appear.
English: Speak of the devil (and he’s sure to appear).
Japanese/English: A drowning man will clutch at a straw.
Japanese: To gain one of your nine lives back.
English: To have a narrow escape from death.
Japanese: The son of a frog will be a frog.
English: Like father like son.
Japanese: Prayers to God in difficult times.
English: Danger past, God forgotten.
Japanese/English: Art is long, life is short.
Latin*: Ars longa, vita brevis. *Bonus language!!!
Japanese: Unless you enter the tiger’s den, you can’t steal her cubs.
English: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Note: I used Izzo’s site to determine which proverbs go with the vignettes in his Brickshelf gallery, but I couldn’t find this one, so I’m not sure what the proverb is. Sorry folks!
A great combination of faces, torsos, and accessories:
The whole folder full of wonderful miscellany:
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=140593
Continuing from Sugegas’s “Udon-Making,” Ichigou has posted his first vignette, a shiritori entry titled “Moon-Viewing Sake:”
Moon-viewing, or tsukimi, parties usually take place on the night of the full moon in August. During these parties, people get together to listen to traditional music, compose poetry, and partake of traditional moon-viewing foods and beverages, including of course sake. (And for those who care about proper pronunciation of foreign words, it’s pronounced saké, as in LEGO! If it were pronounced “saki,” it would be spelled that way!)
The robed monk, the bamboo, and the inverted goblet to represent the sake bottle all combine to make this a wonderful, distinctly Japanese vignette.
Continuing from mumu’s wife’s “Kitarou,” Sugegasa recently posted a new entry, a vignette called “Udon-Making.” (Notice how the U in “Kitarou” carries over to the U in “Udon-Making?” Not all of them work in English like this, but this is a rare example of one that does.)
For those of you who haven’t had Japanese food lately, udon is a type of Japanese noodle made from wheat. (Soba is made from buckwheat.) Udon is generally served in a broth, with seafood, meat, or vegetables, although my favorite is cold udon you dip into a sauce, with various garnishes.
Udon is made by rolling out the dough, folding it over, repeating this process several times, and then cutting the dough into the noodles. Udon shops often feature a window where you can see the udon cook making fresh noodles. (One of my fondest memories is of the udon shop that occupied the first floor of the English school where my dad’s church met. I spent many hours overlooking the main street of Himeji, with the world-famous Himeji Castle dominating the end of the street.)
What I like about this vignette is that Sugegasa captures the rolling pin and dough perfectly, with just two simple pieces. The overall color scheme makes the minifig stand out nicely, though I’m not sure what Peter Pettigrew is doing… ;-)
Bruce writes: “Fifty years ago, in a quiet act of bravery, Rosa Parks stood up for her rights by sitting down. Today this “mother of the modern civil rights movement” was laid to her final rest.”
From concept to execution, this is great work.