The other day, our loving chief editor, Uleshka brought us a bunch of pictures with cool Japanese fonts on them. These are Sake barrels (that’s “saki” to our American friends) made out of Japanese cedar. They are covered with a woven dry straw sheet called “Komo” in order to avoid sunburn and damp. You can often find Sake barrels at Japanese shrines. Why? No, Japanese monks are not terminal alcoholics. Well not all. The reason is of course a traditional one – we offer sake to the gods, thanking them for a good harvest. But today, we are not into the gods, but into the typography written on those very barrels…
Written by Kyoko
(If you want to know how to make Komo, here is an article on just that.)
Anyway, getting back to the Japanese fonts. We often think a lot about latin alphabet fonts – there are serif fonts, sans serif fonts, monospace fonts, Arial, Times New Roman, Courier oh and everyone’s favourite – Comic Sans. However, because of the massive range of characters in the Japanese alphabet (over 2000 in everyday use as opposed to the English alphabet’s 26…) you simply don’t get the diversity in fonts with the Japanese character set as you do in English. But! There are actually different fonts in Japanese used for different purposes, as these Sake barrels show us.
Firstly, believe it or not, there are traditional fonts especially used for Sake. This font is called “Hige-Moji” (Hige is a whisker. Moji is an alphabet character). Hige-Moji is characterised by swooshy tails and often some parts are cracked.
Japan uses this font in some other circumstances too, such as at the sushi restaurant, and the ice shop.
Here is another typeface, called “Sumo-Moji”. Sumo-Moji is characterised by bold type and also being slightly bottom-heavy. It looks “stable”, like a Sumo wrestler as the name would suggest. And, as you might be able to guess, this font is used for Sumo wrestling match lists.
This next example is “Kanteiryu”. The name simply comes from the person who invented it. This is less bold than the others and has an almost gentle look. I heard that this font is designed from the image of a female Kabuki character. Naturally, this font is often used for Japanese traditional theatrical act.
All the fonts mentiond above are from the same era, Edo period, and hence they are sometimes categorized in one group as “Edo-Moji”.
People misuse these fonts without being aware of their historical connotation (I didn’t know the roots until yesterday either, though) but it might be nice to keep that in mind when designing!
PS. By the way, you can design your own Sake barrels. Maybe you can have sake barrel with big heart for your weddings. Also if you would like to know more about the differences between Japanese fonts and characters, we found a great online resource.
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