7 September 2011: Superhero signature

I got my inkan today! An inkan is a seal that is used in Japan instead of a signature. The Japanese sign important documents with their personalised inkan, teachers stamp their students’ homework, and excited travellers (like me) stamp pretty much everything they can get their hands on. 

Two days ago, I went to an inkan shop with the nine other scholars and Seb. Yes, there are special shops the size of a smallish living room where hundreds of types are laid out. As Seb said, “the sky is the limit” with inkan. Well, my sky was the 1,000 Yen note (£8) I had in my purse, which was enough for a sweet little thing which looks more or less like a lipstick. 

But deciding on the type of inkan you want is the easiest part, really. The most important bit is to decide how to spell your name. With three alphabets (hiragana, katakana, kanji) the Japanese language offers a lot of, well, letters. There are thousands of kanji, and every single one looks different (and to me, at this point, impossible to write, with their minute strokes, squares and squiggles) but all are pronounced according to the basic Japanese syllables. So, spelling I-NA can be done in many, many ways. And that’s where the fun started on Monday, with ten scholars, Seb, the shop keeper and the owner all squeezed into a tiny room full of super expensive inkan (15,800 Yen!! The sky is high!) on wobbly tables. I think the three Japanese speakers spent an hour uhm-ing and ah-ing at each other and squiggling elaborate signs to find something fancy that essentially spelt “i”. I settled for a kanji with an “i” sound that stands for “cloak”, or “cloth”, or “cape”, and a kanji with a “na” sound that is often used in girls’ names. “Cape girl” seemed pretty cool to me (I would spell it out here, but I haven’t got the faintest idea how to find these kanji on the internet).

The inkan were meant to take two days, and two days they took. In Japan, people like to be on time. Our bus earlier this week was meant to leave at 12.20 pm, and as the clock went from 12.19 to 12.20, the bus driver looked left, right, and drove off. My word, I love this country.