Hello all,
I got an answer from my potter/shakuhachi player friend. He asked his
shakuhachi teacher and his teacher told him:
they call it "Fuki-hajime no kai" and others might call it "Keiko-Hajime".
When shakuhachi players are invited by koto/shamisen teachers to their New
Year gathering as accompanists, they call it "OHikiZome" but when the
shakuhachi teachers invite koto/shamisen players, they all call it
"Fuki-hajime no kai".
If we write it in Japanese, you notice that "Fukihajime" & "Fukizome, my
version" write with the same characters. I would have thought that I was
right unless my friend had spelled it out in Hiragana also. Anyway, it
doesn't sound very popular things to do among shakuhachi teachers. I wonder
if it is because they are mostly male teachers and it would be too
burdensome for him (unless he has a very dedicated wife who would go out of
her way to assist her husband to organize this big gathering and cook and
serve Oshichi meal & Sake to his students. Probably not many Japanese male
shakuhachi teachers are able to cook or do any housework unlike their
couterpart American teachers!)
As I struggle with English as my second language, I do sympathize you all
who study the Japanese language and writing system as the second language.
There are more than a few characters if you look up for the characters(
about 10) for the sound "Fuku". You can use only one correct character out
of all those "Fuku" sound cahracters. Of those, only two characters have
"Mouth" radical on the left side: Blowing in shakuhachi or flute is
connected with mouth and you can guess correct cahracter as you repeat this
process of learning. That's how we learned them one by one.
Let me tell you a story: I was in my calligraphy calss. I am the only
Japanese student and there are 7 American students. I am the youngest and
newest. One night, an American man was complaing that he couldn't find the
charcter "Atsumeru , to gather" in his dictionary. The person who was
sitting next him , an American woman, said to him " look it up #127 in the
Nelson Japanese Kanji Dictionary". We stood up and brought the dictionary on
the table and opened the page that contained #127. Lo and behold, there it
was !. We looked at her and said " how did you know!?". "Well I memoraized
all charcters in the dictionary with the reference number" said she. We
said " Oh, of cause" and got really depressed. Can you imagine to memoraize
over 20000 charcters with the refrence numbers? Is she nuts? No, she was a
scholor of classical Japanese lit and specialist on Matsuo Basyo. All of
the American students have been attending the class with the same teacher
past 14 years and their level is very advanced: cursive Japanese kana
writing. They write like Honami Koetsu, renowned calligrapher and potter and
I am still struglling with "I Ro Ha Ni Ho He To...." hiragana alphabet My
ego has been bruised black and blue all the time.
Aiko
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