Letter of Intent - Calligraphy

Letter of Intent - Calligraphy
Introduction:
In order to submit one’s self for the Barony of Seagirt’s Scholars’ Trials, one must declare their intent to do so in a letter which fits their persona. My letter of intent is a mix of classical and modern Japanese written using the characters which would have been prevalent in the Muromachi jidai.

The script:
The characters used here are called hentaigana, variant characters. This is derived from the practice of using kanji, chinese characters, to replicate the sounds of the Japanese language. This practice developed into a character set known as Man’yōgana. Named for the Man’yōshu a book of poetry compiled in the 8th century written predominantly with this style of writing.(Seely, 49-54) There were often several characters which were used to represent each sound, which resulted in the hentaigana when they were written in a more flowing script. There is an example chart of characters from the late 17th Century written by a German man named Engelbert Kaempfer below.

Character chart 1690 -1693 Engelbert Kaempfer - as found at http://www.raccoonbend.com/languages/canna.html
I used the UCLA Hentaigana App to learn the hentaigana I used in my letter of intent.

Japanese Epistolary Style:

The following discussion of the choices I made writing this Letter of Intent draw heavily on the Treatise on Epistolary Style written by João Rodrigues between 1604 and 1908. His book cites letters written by such notables as Oda Nobunaga, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

The Japanese language is full of fixed phrases. Ritual things which are said and written depending on the situation but don’t themselves change much. These fixed phrases are as much a part of modern Japanese as they are Classical Japanese. There were many considerations regarding the writing of this letter of intent which dictated the fixed phrases which were used.

Firstly there is the matter of the type of letter being written. In period Japanese letter writing there were two types of letter. First is the direct letter, a letter written to the person directly for use when there was not too much distance between your respective ranks. The second is called a heraldic letter, a letter which was used when writing a letter to someone with significantly higher rank than yourself. (Lamers, ) As I had negligible rank in the court at the time, I chose to write a heraldic letter.

Second was the choice of person to be the recipient of the letter. It had to be a person with rank in court who could address the Baron themselves. I chose one of the existing scholars of Seagirt. This brought a bit of a complication into the matter, because while there were female nobility in Japanese history, they typically did not hold office. So, one did not write a heraldic letter to a female.(Lamers, ) As all of the Scholars of Seagirt are female, I addressed the letter to no one person in particular, using the term O bugyou-sama which means Lord Official. And I used the fixed phrases which matched the level of formality one would use with an official of the court, which was far enough above their rank to address a daimyo¹.

The remainder of the letter:
The remainder of the letter is written in Modern Formal Japanese. I wrote the text of the letter, translated it as best as I could into modern Japanese and asked my Japanese tutor, Marnie Ainsley a person classified by the Japanese Government as a native speaker of Japanese, to help me iron out errors in Grammar, and wording.

Image of the Letter:

Lamers, Jeroen Pieter, and João Rodrigues. Treatise on Epistolary Style: João Rodriguez on the Noble Art of Writing Japanese Letters. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, U of Michigan, 2002. Print.
Seeley, Christopher. A History of Writing in Japan. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991. Print.