Brittany spears throwing out MAJOR SYMBOLISM
(media.greatawakening.win)
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In Japanese, the 久 (the 'hisa' is the word 'hisashiburi' 久しぶり) can also be read as 'kyuu' or 'ku') typically means 'long time' or 'old story'. That kind of connotation. The phrase 'hisashiburi' has a meaning similar to "long time no see!"
The second character is the hiragana 'no' の and is probably acting as grammatical particle, often used to connect 2 nouns among other grammatical uses.
The third character is 'ko' 子, and this means child/youngster/etc.
My gut tells me this is suppose to be a straightforward title, to be read as "(long) story of children" or "Children's Story". But this entire picture alludes to some else, so there's probably more to it.
The nuance within Japanese makes me want to dig a little deeper. I could definitely be missing something, especially considering the way the first character is written. 久 makes the most sense to me, but this could be a play with kanji (chinese characters), which the Japanese are known for.
Anyone else with insight here?
欠 is pronounced けつ, ketsu which means "lack". Lack of child, or missing child.
I don't see 欠 at all, but it would make more sense, wouldn't it? Artistic license, maybe? Or an attempt at combining the characters, so that it might read something like "(missing) story of children" or "story of missing children". Assuming 久 is right at all, which might be a big assumption...
The reason I am not seeing 久 as the symbol is because the second stroke is a single stroke like in フ. In the painting, the symbol uses 4 strokes. Like ケ with an additional stroke. 欠 just seems to make sense in this context.
I agree with your reasoning. It doesn't seem exactly like either in the painting, although 欠 certainly fits better. My guess is if you're not correct, you are certainly on the right track.
Arigato!
Looks like my suggestion was on target that some characters are similar across certain languages. In this case, ko in Japanese and part of hao in Mandarin.
Kanji is Japanese.
Yes and no.
Kanji is the Japanese word for chinese characters, literally. "kan" 漢 meaning Sino/China and "ji" 字, character/letter/word. It's also what they use to describe the chinese characters they adopted into their syllabary. These are chinese characters, some of which have changed within Japanese over time to become uniquely Japanese. They can have their own unique Japanese sounds associated with them (kun-yomi, or Japanese reading) but still retain japanese-ified (technical term) chinese sounds (on-yomi, or Chinese reading).
Ex. 人 = ひと, hito (kun-yomi); じん, jin (on-yomi) -- there are other pronunciations, but I'm only listing these as an example.
nani!!??
TLDR: Japanese is hard, yo.
Japanese can take even more leeway with the use of furigana, tiny kana (the "letters" from both their "alphabets") written besides or above kanji and used to give the proper reading for a kanji, either for unknown kanji for the target audience age or for disambiguation.
Authors can use those furigana to give new readings to a kanji, a very common usage of this is "ability names" in manga, one of the most well-known being "The World", written "Sekai" which means "World", and pronounced "Za Warudo" as per the furigana which is the Japanese way of pronouncing the English words "The World". The character never says "Sekai", and the Japanese reader reads "Za Warudo", but knows it has a link to his understanding of "Sekai". Sometimes there's no correlation at all, and the furigana just gives a cool-sounding name to a set of kanji otherwise describing what the character is actually doing.
Furigana can also be used to include a double-meaning, as in "what I say" in kanji within the spoken sentence from one character to another, compared to "what I really think" in furigana, making perfect sense in Japanese, but is way harder to properly translate and may lead to loss of information...
Again, Japanese is hard, yo.