Is this what you're referring to ? Seems a lot of younger people nowadays hold their pens like that. Writing all day at school is tiring and perhaps they do that to relax their hands.

Ahhhh .. but I think I see what you're referring to. In calligraphy you hold the brush vertically. Perhaps sometimes Japanese people also hold their pens in the calligraphy way. When you hold the brush vertically, it means you use the strength of your whole body from the waist up to move the brush, even for a small tiny little hook. That's what my teacher taught me anyway.

They teach you to train this by drawing long lines with the brush on newspaper, horizontals, verticals, diagonals and then big circles, all by moving your upper body. If you do it with the hand or arm alone you have to bend your wrist when you draw a line towards your chest, and it is not so easy to draw good straight lines. It also gives more "expression" into your calligraphy.

That kind of grip is different than holding a pen, it's a bit like you join the tip of your fingers and let your hand fall down from the wrist. I don't think you can use that and draw properly with the upper body and a pen. I don't think the "monkey grip" is a good alternative either.

Basically I think you don't have fine control with the "monkey grip" so whether for kanji or not I don't think it helps write Japanese, like I said probably relieves tension in the wrist when you write a lot.

Here is a small blog entry on that topic (with images). Interesting, I think I will give it a try.

In English, I find the monkey grip more suited for print letters and the 'western' grip better for cursive.

I can't seem to get good control holding it the 'Japanese' way, perhaps I'm doing it wrong? Does anyone have better pictures of this?
(I consulted Death Note, but Light writes western style 0_o)


edit: of course, my handwriting is horrid regardless of pen position >_>

Last edited by uberstuber (2008 April 24, 12:40 pm)

Very interesting! And that position makes sense to me... I've probably seen it somewhere before used by a japanese.

Not related to Japanese, I know a person who holds the pen in a very VERY strange way. He pushes his thumb on one side of the pen, and the tips of the other four fingers on the other side, evenly spaced from the point to (almost) the tail of the pen. So the pen stays very vertical, and the little finger is practically touching the paper alongside the tip. Has anybody seen this? I don't know what to call it... the octopus grip?

Last edited by nac_est (2008 April 25, 2:23 am)

By holding the pen straight you will get thinner lines than if you held it at an angle (depends on pencil/pen too).  Maybe due to the complexity of Kanji characters it's easier to draw them with thin lines.

That's the only reasoning I could come up with.  You still have to retrain your hand for accuracy, precision, etc in this new position.

Interesting topic!
Ive never noticed how my friends hold their pens before.
Ive always held my pen differently when writing in English, anyway. I rest the pencil between my index and middle finger and guide it with my thumb. I keep the pencil vertical.
I tend to write Western style when Im writing in Japanese, though... its easier that way.

I've been using a 筆ペン these days, and today something came to mind. I always found it difficult to make the right-to-left strokes with the brush pen (like the 4th stroke in 指 or the 7th in 笑) while using the western grip, because the movement goes against the direction of the "hairs" and it feels like you're  bending and damaging them. On the other hand (in the abstract sense...), when holding the brush vertical, as some japanese seem to be doing, making strokes left-to-right or right-to-left stresses the tip in the same moderate way.
So the vertical grip may be a remnant of the time when brushes were the only writing tools. Now it isn't needed any more, because ball-point pens don't usually have "preferred" stroke directions.

Hmm...I wouldn't have considered the effect of having your paper angled. Very interesting.

I find my writing is moderately better if I hold my pen vertically and actually try to write nicely. It's not an amazing difference, but enough that I have started holding my pen that way when I need to write something neatly.

Pen angle only matters for brushes. When you're writing with a pen vertically, you're just writing slower and paying more attention since it's different from how you normally hold a pen and thus awkward. There is nothing inherent in holding a pen vertically that can improve writing. In other words, placebo.

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2008 May 26, 8:22 am)