Translation of Japanese/Chinese Writing

[Jon Shiu]

Found these plate adapters inside an old back and wondered what it says?

thanks,

Jon
150252

[Jim Jones]

Its Japanese. Read right to left it may be kabine yoo, or cabinet (film size) use.

[Oren Grad]

Jim has it. The right-to-left reading is an old style. Kabine size is Japanese half-plate, or 4.75" x 6.5".

[Jac@stafford.net]

To me it looks like a price code.
.

[Jon Shiu]

Okay, thanks!

[peter schrager]

walmart??

[Mark Sawyer]

"Your exposures will bring people great happiness. In bed."

[richardman]

I read Chinese (Kanji). There's one kana there, and the wording is backward, but I am 99% sure that it says "Do not use force".

[Kirk Gittings]

"Your exposures will bring people great happiness. In bed."

:)

[peter schrager]

Wrong..it says only open in complete darkness! !

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk

[B.S.Kumar]

"Your exposures will bring people great happiness. In bed."

Longer exposures will bring greater happiness. :)

[BetterSense]

I read Chinese (Kanji). There's one kana there, and the wording is backward, but I am 99% sure that it says "Do not use force".

Perhaps you are reading the か as 力.

My rusty Japanese read " kabine yoo " ... "For cabinet use"...i have no idea what that means.

[richardman]

Perhaps you are reading the か as 力.

My rusty Japanese read " kabine yoo " ... "For cabinet use"...i have no idea what that means.

What happened to the stroke on the top right if it is か? And aren't katakana written with curved strokes? Is that hiragana?

[BetterSense]

I didn't mean [the glyph]か. I rather meant [the syllable]か. "か" is pronounced "ka" My brain read it as か. To me it looks like かびね用 or カビネ用. In Japanese 力 is a kanji meaning literally power or energy and カ is a kana pronounced "ka". They look the same. Yes it's retarded but I can't fix Japanese.

[Jim Andrada]

Japanese was written right to left to some extent pretty much up to WW II

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing_in_East_Asian_scripts

This poster announcing the opening of the Ginza Subway line in 1927 is written right to left

150340

It says East West Unique/Only Under Ground RailRoad (Although it's from right to left so Road Iron Under Ground Unique West East) and the second line says it 's initiating the connection of Ueno and Asakusa

Japanese is remarkably insensitive to character order - when writing on a vehicle it often starts at the front on both sides. The writing on the camera back uses Katakana - the Katatkana for Ka doesn't have the little apostrophe that Hiragana has, otherwise they're the same. and as was mentioned, the names of temples are commonly written right to left on the sign over the entrance.

And it gets worse - there are times a three character string needs to be read starting with the middle character and then the leftmost and then the rightmost - it's an un-godly mess! Surprisingly they have one of the highest literacy rates anywhere and bookstores are popular.

[asf]

Jim and Oren are correct

It is katakana "ka bi ne" and kanji "you"

Hiragana and katakana were derived from kanji which were brought in from China

They have a very complex system of writing, thousands of characters are in common use, a few can look similar especially if you don't know what you're looking at

[Jim Andrada]

And by the way, the "yoo" (用) is commonly used to designate a usage - in other words "for" in the sense of "use for Kabine" in this case or for example "常用漢字" (jooyookanji) or the standard set of common use Kanji characters.　Or 凡用 (bonyoo) = general purpose.

Probably more than anyone wanted to know. Or as the story goes, when the teacher asked the class why "Moby Dick" was great literature, one of the students answered that it was great literature because it told him more about whales than he wanted to know...

And to this day the Ginza line is color coded yellow just like it was in 1927