Ep 9 of Kamichu is pretty much the only part of it I ever rewatch, but I revisit it several times per year. There's just something about that episode that resonates with me, and not just because it features IJN Yamato. (It's also what I wanted most from the series: lots of magic, and no middle-school angst. Shame most of the episodes weren't like this one.)

Over at the Duck's I left a joke comment about how the guy who built the 1/40 scale Yamato replica out of Legos forgot the "Soda is available" sign. That's a reference to this episode. Yurie researches the ship and learns that there was a room in it where they made soda. She thinks maybe there was a sign like that on the ship. The sign to which she refers is one that shows up in corner grocery stores:

And next to that is the one she draws herself:

I got curious about what it really says. It's written old style, in columns which are read right-to-left. The first column says ラムネ ramune which turns out to be the Japanese word for soda pop. The other one, though...

First two characters are hiragana あり ari and I've got it worked out that the word must be a version of ariawase which means "on hand, available, ready", but I cannot figure out what that last kanji is. It looks as if it's 4 strokes, especially the way Yurie writes it (though she's being sloppy about leaving out a corner in her first stroke). None of my standard tools are helping me here, either. There doesn't seem to be any 4-stroke kanji based on either 口 or 囗, according to the Multradix lookup. And I can't find anything that looks like that in the Jouyou Kanji.

It's driving me nuts. Anyone care to help me out here?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 08:56 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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