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The earliest Japanese romanization system was based on Portuguese orthography.It was developed c. 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Anjirō. [2] [citation needed] Jesuit priests used the system in a series of printed Catholic books so that missionaries could preach and teach their converts without learning to read Japanese orthography.
The jisei, or death poem, of Kuroki Hiroshi, a Japanese sailor who died in a Kaiten suicide torpedo accident on 7 September 1944. It reads: "This brave man, so filled with love for his country that he finds it difficult to die, is calling out to his friends and about to die".
Nihon-shiki (Japanese: 日本式ローマ字, lit. 'Japan-style', romanized as Nihonsiki in the system itself) is a romanization system for transliterating the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet. Among the major romanization systems for Japanese, it is the most regular one and has an almost one-to-one relation to the kana writing system.
The Japanese share superstitions with other Asian cultures, particularly the Chinese, with whom they share significant historical and cultural ties. The unluckiness of the number four is one such example, as the Japanese word for "four" 四 romaji: shi is a homophone for "death" kanji : 死.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
For example, 東京 (とうきょう) is properly romanized as Tōkyō, but can also be written as: Tokyo – not indicated at all. Common for Japanese words that have been adopted into English, and the de facto convention for Hepburn used in signs and other English-language information around Japan.
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Hanasaka Jiisan (花咲か爺さん), also called Hanasaka Jijii (花咲か爺), is a Japanese folk tale.. Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford collected it in Tales of Old Japan (1871), as "The Story of the Old Man Who Made Withered Trees to Blossom". [1]