katakana – Calligraphy by Vicky

Writing foreign names in Japanese

A Japanese calligraphy commission. I wrote the client's name on a small red hanging scroll.

Japanese has a separate writing system for writing foreign words. It’s called katakana and it’s mostly used for foreign loan words such as kōhī (coffee), pan (bread) and gorufu (golf). It’s also used for foreign names. If your name isn’t originally written in kanji (the logographic characters used in Japan, China, and to a lesserContinueContinue reading “Writing foreign names in Japanese”