My birthday.
I can get into the Kyoto botanical garden free. The two or three dollar entry fee is waived, including for the greenhouse. I arrive at the early opening time, 7.30, for morning glory days. I show my identification card and say breezily to the guard, “Toshi o totte,” slang for “aged.” I notice others of my bent.
Westerners tend toward decades, arbitrarily, discussing a person’s years. In Japan, however, 60 signifies second childhood, I was told, because of being 5 times the 12 year astrological cycle.
In my Japanese language lesson, a grandmother appears on her birthday. The 88th birthday is called "rice celebration" because of the pun in kanji, lingual symbols from China used to write Japanese:
/\ eight
\ | /
----- rice
/ | \
米 rice
The 99th is "white birthday." The pun subtracts a horizontal line --"one" in kanji--from "a hundred" to arrive at a kanji that means "white."
百 hundred
minus 一 minus one
becomes 白 white
Mr. Kokawa, a professor whose specialty is dictionaries, agrees that word play on kanji is very popular in Japan.
“Double numbers are…” He searches for the word.
“Auspicious?”
“Yes, auspicious.”
He draws the kanji for “seven” three times and says it is slang for joyfulness, a homonym for yellow.
“Therefore, 77 is yellow celebration,” he explains. “Forget about the third 7. It is just there to make the pun.”
