I don’t know if this is the right community to ask about this. I’ll delete the post if it’s not.
I got this tea set at a thrift store today and I tried to look up the makers mark out of curiosity, but I’m awful with kanji and I havent been able to get any online tools to help figure it out. I know it’s probably not anything special, but I’m still curious.
I don’t know Japanese but I do know Chinese. The red characters, upside down, should be 美峰, and the sticker, right side up, should be 宮
Reading for 美峰 is probably bihou, likely the name of the shop that made it. Found some other porcelain ware from shops with that name when I searched it.
The one on the sticker is normally written as 宮 (miya - big shrine, palace). There is a way of writing Kanji that makes them even boxier than the standard ones, often for use in stamps that painters use to sign their work. This looks like a stylised version of that with a thicker brush stroke where they just extended the little vertical lines downward. For fun.
The hand painted ones are upside down. No clear idea how to read them honestly because the combination doesn’t appear to be used much or is a place that is famous enough. 美 (maybe mi - beautiful, august) 峰 (probably mine - mountain ridge). Could be a place or a quote from a haiku where shit gets condensed like a tweet or something.
The bottom character kinda looks like it might be a fancy 美 (beauty), but I’m not sure. I have no idea what’s going on with that top one. I can’t figure out what the radical on the right is trying to be.
Man, it’s weird that in both languages I’m familiar with the ‘fancy’ script is nearly illegible chicken scratch. Why does that keep happening? Maybe a way to appear appease certain nobility that couldn’t write for shit?
I’m sorry, but this comment is quite ignorant.
Nobody who understands kanji would call this particular signature illegible or a “chicken scratch.”
The lines flow very beautifully between strokes and the size ratio among the individual radicals are very pleasing to the eye and the characters, overall, look very proper.
Maybe a way to appear appease certain nobility that couldn’t write for shit?
As someone who does calligraphy sometimes (I should practice more lol), those “chicken scratch” styles are very hard. Most people can’t read them because they are not familiar and can’t write like that themselves. For example cursive kanji is real hard, and yes, hard to read. But you certainly can’t sloppily write kanji and have it turn out the same as cursive kanji. The nobility certainly could write very well, and legible if they want. That’s the thing: they were nobility and had time and money to practice things such as calligraphy and poetry. These styles were not to appease nobility, the nobility themselves developed them. The peasants were poor and had to work, they couldn’t even read, let alone write, and had certainly no time for calligraphy.
I think it’s a ware mark. The calligraphy used can make the kanji neigh illegible even for native Japanese readers.
MEIFENG as best as I can tell. Please note, I can not read Kanji but it seems this is the wrong orientation in the pic. I had to crop it and rotate it to get it to translate.
Feng is not valid Japanese (must end in vowel or n) so it’s getting translated as Chinese which does allow that.
Yeah I got that result on google translate too, but the kanji or hanzi symbols it picks out are wrong.
Using my iPhone to translate I got the same thing
I think it’s something like “beautiful mountain range”.
