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itsthecourier

somebody explained me that the correct way to appreciate this painting is to invert it on horizontal axis.

the reason is, japanese is read from right to left.

once you invert it you can appreciate it better

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You mean like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa_-...

His "Big Wave" has that right left position

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8d/Th...

Love the birds in this one, especially the way it mirrors the wave crest fingers. Hokusai seems to have lunch ved these birds. They figure in his caged Bird pieces.

That "Big Wave" variation with birds flying over the waves is strikingly beautiful. So dynamic and raw compared to the famous one. And how poetic the shapes of birds rhyme with the shape of waves. I'm gonna have to set aside some time to appreciate Hokusai's works again. Lovely.

The wave/birds juxtaposition is very Escher-like

Indeed.

Check this out

https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1899550/1/11/

I don't know whether Escher was familiar with Hokusai's work but they shared a common interest in tilings and tesselations. Damned if I can find those Hokusai sketches on the web now.

Wow that is kind of mind-blowing. Looking through other pages, Hokusai is showing each "rule" (法) and its application (tessalation) that produces the pattern. It makes me wonder about what kind of cultural exchange was happening between Japan and Europe at the time.

Escher would be generations younger. However, I am curious about whether Hokusai encountered any Islamic art. Tesselations and symmetry play a big role in that one. I submitted ed this link as a separate HN post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47902993

This is Shingata komon-cho 新形小紋帳 (Book of New Patterns) from 1824, held by the British Museum: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1973-0723-...

The wave is almost like a live character in this one. Like an angry god caught in a moment of fury.

Yes. Several references argue for that:

- Art Institute of Chicago (https://www.artic.edu/articles/1139/10-things-to-know-about-...)

- Daily Art Magazine (https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/great-wave-hokusai/#:~:text...)

- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa#Re...)

Doesn't this assume that people (in the west, at least) "perceive" paintings from left to right? That doesn't strike me as particularly true.

Doesn't strike me as particularly true either.

Look up “spatial agency bias” and “glance curve”

This is taught in graphic design, how people typically scan information from left to right and top to bottom, in cultures where the written language flows in that direction. However, a counter argument could be made that people perceive paintings differently from the way they read written text. There have been studies about how the Japanese perceive images and sounds with the same area of the brain that processes language, in contrast to other cultures where they're processed separately. [citaion needed]

I thought I'd be unimpressed by the mirrored version, but I can say that for myself, it really did have a different feel to it.

I've always pictured the boats moving right, sliding down, as if surfing the wave.

The mirrored version makes it clear that, no, they're going against the wave, which makes it that much more of a scary situation!

Now, having noticed that, I see how the position of the rowers in the boat would be enough to deduce that. But still, it goes to show that (at least for me, personally, in this specific case) the mirroring really did bring a more intuitive feel for what the artist was trying to represent.

This is like saying westerners need to read mirrored manga to truly appreciate the artist’s intent. You can just start reading from the right…

I do think that there's some loss in translated manga, actually!

When the mangaka is creating the layout, they're conceptualizing the flow not only of the panels, but also of the text inside panels, to be RTL.

Translating the text into a LTR language without mirroring the image, makes it so that your eyes have to zig zag around a bit more, going RTL panel wise, but LTR text box wise.

Compared to the problems that mirroring the art brings, I still think that's best compromise of the options, but doesn't mean it's not an actual impact on the experience, even if a subtle one.

I have wondered before, though, about how had might it be to learn to read mirrored, RLT english. Might be a bit of a challenge at first, but would enable you to read translated manga RTL with no compromises (other than the inherent lossiness of language translation in general).

I think there’s already enough lost in translation that the text direction is the least of your worries haha

For sure it's a very minor impact, all things considered, but an impact nonetheless.

... specifically, Japanese is traditionally written top to bottom, then right to left. (In contrast, English is written left to right, then top to bottom.)

So, armed with that knowledge, are you going to rotate it as well?

If you are talking about page order or panel order (in something like manga), those go right to left. More specifically, manga panels follow the usual western comic book panel order, except with left and right flipped.

However, when it comes to the actual text (regardless of the medium), it is always written either top to bottom or left to right. There is no right to left text writing in japanese. This isn't arabic, where text is indeed written right to left.

When written top to bottom, the columns are read from right to left. This is the most common format for printed text, especially in Hokusai's time.

Also, when text was horizontal, it was frequently written right to left until the mid-1940s.[1]

[1] https://www.mutantfrog.com/2009/08/08/the-history-of-japanes...

Again, even in the scenario you are describing, it is right-to-left when it comes to organizing columns/page layout (just like it would be with manga), but the text is still not right-to-left. It is top-to-bottom text vertical columns going left-to-right horizontally.

There is not a single instance I can think of where the actual text in Japanese would be read/written horizontally right-to-left.

My original comment only mentioned traditional Japanese text layout. Let's just look at the text in the Great Wave:

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%95%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3...

Per https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%A5%9E%E5%A5%88%E5%B7%9D%E6... , it is read 「冨嶽三十六景 / 神奈川沖 / 浪裏」 which is top to bottom, then right to left, i.e. "神奈川沖" before "浪裏".

Arguments about modern Japanese text layout is beyond the scope of my original comment, and I don't think it's meaningful to discuss it anyway. Those who know and use Japanese know, and those who don't, don't need to know.

Did you read the article I linked? Or even the third sentence of my comment? The scenario I'm describing is horizontal text! It was common pre-war.

If you'd like to have an instance, here's a sign written horizontally from right to left.

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

it must be done, bro, for you, anything

Japanese characters are actually written left to right, but sometimes the page order is right to left. Writing that you might find on a website, e-mails, and scientific writing is typically actually written left to right. While these kinds of texts may have pages that are ordered from right to left, the text on the pages is typically written from left to right. It is typically only when text is written vertically (yokogaki) that it is written in columns going from right to left, and in that case, the characters are read top to bottom.

Sources: [1] https://www.lingocommand.com/japanese/writing-systems-explai... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writin... [3] I studied Japanese in college lol

You are right, but it can be argued that during the time the painting was made, vertical writing was the predominant form, and I don't know whether horizontal writing was a thing at the time in Japan...

That said, as I implied in my other reply, the whole idea is a bit silly...

Japanese is currently read and written from left to right. However, until about 80 years ago (before World War II), it was read and written from right to left—though this applied only to horizontal writing. Vertical writing is read from right to left, and this convention continues today; for example, Japanese comics (manga) are still read from right to left.

When written horizontally it is now left to right but earlier you would see horizontal right to left. But vertical was preferred especially in the past.

You can see horizontal train stop signs written right to left in “In This Corner of the World” anime. Today all signage seems to be left to right.

[edit] The history section in Wikipedia explains that this was a postwar script reform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system

Horizontal right to left is an edge case of vertical writing with one character tall columns.

In the time this art was made, top to bottom, right to left was the standard. It's pretty apparent when looking at any document from the Edo era. It's all top to bottom, right to left. Remnants of it are also clear in temples where the signs above doorways are written right to left, not even top to bottom. Plus every Japanese novel and manga today is still written top to bottom right to left.

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