Cool, didn't know that. I learned that kanji as 'chamber' and then learned the words 暖房 and 冷房. Recently I learned it as tuft/ふさ while reading about animals.

Cool info, thanks for posting. I had no idea what the tassel connection was. The only word I've actually learned with this was 暖房 (heating) and the 'chamber' meaning makes more sense. This kind of background makes it a lot easier to create an image to remember.

By the way, from that japanese link:

青房 = east associated with the Azure Dragon 青龍 (せいりゅう) and spring
赤房 = south associated with the Vermillion Bird 朱雀 (すざく) and summer
白房 = west associated with the White Tiger 白虎 (びゃっこ) and autumn
黒房 = north associated with the Black Tortoise 玄武 (げんぶ) and winter

These being the Four Symbols of Chinese mythology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Symbo … llation%29

These mythological terms are in EDICT but don't seem to be in the MS IME which makes them a pain to type. This stuff is neat though. Thanks again!

I loved that post btw. It inspired me to add a discussion area to the kanji pages, but well... some day. At least it's in the to-do's somewhere >_<.

Transtic wrote:

I confirmed it with  the 大辞林 (だいじりん) from the Yahoo Dictionaries. I suppose that each of the four sides of a sumo ring must correspond to a different cardinal point and the related god.

That would make sense. I know very little about Chinese / Japanese mythology but even less about sumo customs...

Great post.  This is much better than the retarded tassle story I came up with.  Thanks for the info!

I loved the 房 explanation. Thank you!!

Thanks for the great info! I'm a fan of sumo so I like to make connections to sumo in my kanji stories wherever I can. Here are a couple others: remainder 残 (frame 808) and dragon 竜 (frame 536)

WolfErrant wrote:

青房 = east associated with the Azure Dragon 青龍 (せいりゅう) and spring
赤房 = south associated with the Vermillion Bird 朱雀 (すざく) and summer
白房 = west associated with the White Tiger 白虎 (びゃっこ) and autumn
黒房 = north associated with the Black Tortoise 玄武 (げんぶ) and winter

Wow that's cool, if anyone else played FFXI these were the 4 bosses in sky.

For me, what worked for this kanji was fairly simple.  I'll post it here just because it's related to the thread, but the trivia about the sumo rings is pretty cool.

戸 = door/ The Doors (i.e. band with Jim Morrison)
房 = Naked Indian Man from The Doors movie (who Jim Morrison meets in a dream).  Think "Hollywood Indian" whose costume goes beyond the point of authenticity and well into absurdity.  So inauthentic and "Hollywoody" is his costume that even Naked Indian Man's compass has a tassel on it.


A little linguistic trivia: Not all languages have the same defined boundaries for their colors.  If you pointed to a piece of turquoise stone and asked an English speaker what color it was, you'd likely get the answer "blue."  However, there's a less common word to describe this color, which is "indigo" (or, of course, the word "turquoise" itself).  You could say that in the absence of this less common vocabulary word, though, the English word "blue" describes both BLUE and INDIGO.  I'm writing these in CAPS to indicate that I'm referring to inter-lingual concepts and not our English words.

Similarly, in Japanese, 青 actually refers to the concept-colors BLUE and GREEN.  There are more specific words in Japanese for the individual colors, as there are in the English example with indigo, but ask a Japanese speaker to look at a spectrum of color (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet), and mark the boundaries for 青, and they would include both BLUE and GREEN. 

In other languages, still weirder things happen, like the native vocabulary consisting of only three fundamental color words to describe anything from white to black (at least what we English speakers consider white and black) to any other color in the spectrum.  The bottom line is that if you look at a spectrum of colors (get a prism, put it up to a window...), there actually aren't any sharp boundaries in the light to define each color.  We perceive boundaries because we are used to thinking of yellow and green as different (though Crayola certainly has helped blur these boundaries for most of us), but yellow and green are actually choices.  They're choices that Indo-Europeans, or their ancestors, made for us, tens of thousands of years ago.

Last edited by jajaaan (2009 December 03, 4:52 pm)

Wow that definitely solidifies the kanji in my head now, thanks so much for posting this informative information.