Kanji of Ryuseiken Battodo

[rawnshah]

I figured out how to get the Kanji for Ryuseiken Battodo written out in Microsoft Word. It was a pain for one. If you want any foreign language installed for Microsoft Word and Office, you need to go to Start > Control Panels > Regional and Language Options > Languages > Details button. You can then click on Add and pick additional languages (on top of English) to install on the machine. This works for some other tools on Windows XP too, but not all.

When you add Japanese, it also adds the keyboard capabilities so you can input Hiragana, and build Kanji from it. There is a little toolbar at appears near the top right, that lets you do the non-English character input. This isn't so for all languages, but certainly for Japanese and Chinese, it's very necessary. And then it gets hard... :)

The Kanji above spells out Ryuseiken Battodo. The first three characters are Ryu (Dragon), Sei (Star) and Ken (Sword). The second three characters are Nuku (To Draw out), To (Sword) and Do (The Way). Batto is the two characters for Nuku and To put together.

So to create it, you have to know how to spell the root kanji in terms of in English text which the software translates to hiragana, and then offers the different possible Kanji matches. I also took out my Japanese dictionary to figure out the kanji. On interesting thing is that there are at least two different Kanji for dragon, and the one we use is the older one (the first character), rather than the newer one (also called tatsu). However, I didn't know this until I asked Shihan, and I spent an hour counting strokes and trying to find the correct Kanji; only later to find that all I had to do was spell out ryuu (extra u) so it actually spelled the character phonetically.

In standard Japanese, the kanji would be swapped in order to say Battodo Ryuseiken rather than how we describe it in English, so the two sets of characters above would be swapped. But for English speakers the order as shown above is fine. Just be aware it's written differently in Japanese. You can see the Japanese ordering on our wall-hanging scrolls.

More esoterica: Ken and To are two different kanji for a reason. Ken refers to any kind of sword, whereas To refers more accurately to the Japanese Katana. You can refer to European, Chinese, Arabian, etc. swords as ken and you can also use it to indicate the katana, but if you want to be really correct in writing, the To kanji is more accurate.