Translation please

[Babu]

Anyone make this out? 

Thank you 

[Shugyosha]

Furugawa Genchin.

[Babu]

Thank you John.

 

[SteveM]

Also Furukawa Mototaka, as Wakayama says.

 

These two different readings were a topic of another recent thread. I started digging a bit deeper into these readings, but I hit a brick wall. 

The problem stems from the two possible readings of these kanji.

 

元 = gen, moto

常 = jō, tsune

珍 = chin, and very rarely taka

 

Wakayama says: Furukawa Mototaka was the father of Furukawa Tsunetaka (常珍), and studied with Yokoya Sōmin. 

 

Wakayama himself used a 19th century text written by Akiyama Kyusaku as his reference. One of the first western scholars of such things, Henri Joly, also used Akiyama Kyusaku as a source, but Joly claims the readings as Genchin and Jōchin. Haynes is supposed to have used Wakayama as his main reference, but Haynes claims the names are read as Genchin and Jōchin, so I suspect Haynes used Joly's readings for this artist. Andy Quirt makes a slightly circular argument, saying that since the son's name was Jōchin, it's likely the father's name was Genchin, which ignores the references that claim both father and son use Mototaka and Tsunetaka respectively. 

 

So why the two readings? As most people on this site know, kanji characters have two ways of being read: one is a native Japanese style (kun'yomi) and the other is a replication of the original Chinese pronunciation (on'yomi). The Japanese style is used for native Japanese words, and the Chinese style is used for words or concepts that arrived through various waves of writings or scholars from the mainland. However names can use either the on'yomi pronunciation, or the kun'yomi pronunciation, OR, they can take on an altogether unique and idiosyncratic pronunciation used specifically for names (sometimes called nanori). These name-readings (nanori) are devilishly hard to predict for the foreign reader. Taka is indeed a unique reading of 珍. It is not an intuitive reading, as we sometimes find. It is a reading that is deliberate and uncommon, at least nowadays. I feel that Wakayama must have had some reason for stating definitively that the name should be pronounced Mototaka. But I have yet to solve the puzzle.

 

Genchin is certainly a more intuitive reading, and given the connection with Sōmin, it is easy to imagine a symmetry in the names Sōmin, Genchin, Jōchin, which all share the same kind of construction and euphony .  

 

If anyone has a copy of Akiyama Kyusaku's original work, I would be very interested to see if there is a clue to the reading of this name. Or, if Markus has an idle second and has some information on this artist, I would be very happy to hear what he has to say. 

 

As a side note; in China there is usually only one way to pronounce a kanji, and so you don't run into this problem of multiple readings. Not often, anyway. In Japan, the problem of multiple readings is somewhat compensated by using far fewer kanji in daily life than is used in China.  So in China there are tens of thousands of kanji, but each has only one pronunciation, whereas in Japan we only use about 2000 - 3000 kanji, but each kanji has multiple pronunciations. As a further side note, the on'yomi in Japan isn't necessarily associated with China; I mean, Japanese people do not suppose they are speaking Chinese just because words use on'yomi. The connection is only historical. It is similar to how many words in English have their origins in the Latin language, but we don't imagine that we could converse in Latin just because there are words in our vocabulary that came from Latin. Its not a perfect analogy, but maybe a useful one.

 

references:

http://www.shibuiswords.com/makoto-ni.htm

http://www.nihonto.us/LS017 FURUGAWA GENCHIN.htm

http://www.shibuiswords.com/books.htm

 

 

 

 

[Shugyosha]

I'll be honest and say (lacking Steve's scholarship) I looked at this a tad less deeply: I put my first guess in (Kogawa Genchin) and it came up with the Nihonto US example so, having realised I made an error with Kogawa, I simply went with Andy Quirt's take on it presuming that he would have got his reading from a reliable source.

[Babu]

Furugawa Genchin is in Seskos so seems a likely contender. 

I don't have wakayama so cannot comment on its likelihood being that way. 

Thank you for all your help as always.