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The story
Comedy duo Milk Boy’s Takashi Utsumi caused a stir after saying on an ABC Radio program that he’d uncovered a “major incident” over how to write the kanji “様” (used for honorifics like “Mr./Mrs.”), calling it shocking after “living 40 years” without noticing. Utsumi said he’d spent 40 years writing the right-hand part — which looks like the kana “ハ” — as two separate strokes (the "separate style"), when in fact Japanese elementary schools have taught a connected, single-stroke version (the "straight-through style") as standard since the 1950s. On 5ch, people shared similar experiences — “I only noticed looking at my kid’s workbook,” “I wrote it the separate way until I was 30” — and opinions split over which way is actually correct.
Tue, Nov 4, 2:59 PM
Comedy duo Milk Boy appeared on ABC Radio’s “Milk Boy’s Tuesday, Isn’t It!” (airing Tuesdays at noon) on the 3rd. Takashi Utsumi (40) revealed that something shocking had happened involving a certain kanji.
At the top of the show, Utsumi opened with “There’s something I want you all to hear,” then said, “Something really shocking happened last night… It’s a major incident after living 40 years. I really want everyone to hear this,” turning to his partner Takashi Komaba and co-host, announcer Chihiro Washio.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Seems like it'd be awkward to write
For me it was "卸" (wholesale)
I always split it into "ケ" and "正"
Liar, lol
I wrote it separate at first too, but I caught it and fixed it early
I think I noticed back in elementary school
Noticed it was wrong while helping my kid with homework, but it's too late to fix now
Like 女→くノ一 (the kanji "女" for woman breaks down into く+ノ+一, which is literally where the word "kunoichi" for female ninja comes from) — easy mnemonic, and as long as it still looks like the character, who cares
Stop flexing about stroke order differences, lol
"Kokera-otoshi" (a theater-opening ceremony, written 杮)
vs. eating a persimmon, "kaki" (柿)
↑
Nobody can tell 杮 and 柿 apart anyway
But I have definitely learned wrong stroke order
Like with 減 (decrease) — I write the horizontal stroke on the right side first
That little stroke poking out at the top has to be a short dot first, otherwise it looks off
My teacher was born before the war
Calling it "wrong" might be the real mistake here
Probably some elementary school teacher back in the day taught it the separate way, so people ended up learning the stroke order differently from today
The kanji "必" (as in 必然/inevitable, 必要/necessary) seems to have changed too. My grandfather wrote 心 (heart) first, then added a ノ stroke to finish. What I was taught in elementary school was: write the top dot first, then draw an X, then add dots on the left and right to finish. These days, what I learned in elementary school is treated as the correct way
Wait, really? I thought 心 then ノ was correct
When did the stroke order change?
He's 40 — did he really learn the old-style form? Anyway, that reminds me of the exchange over the character "専" in the manga Jukushi Ben-chan
Maybe his parents or a calligraphy teacher corrected him to the old style, and nobody ever called it out since
Apparently it looks like a building across a road to them
> Apparently it looks like a building across a road
No idea what you're talking about, lol
But weren't there other kanji with the same separate-style thing going on?
That stroke order is what gave rise to Japan's hiragana culture in the first place
If we're going that far, shouldn't we trace it all the way back to oracle bone script stroke order?
Oracle bone script doesn't even have stroke order
That's just how writing systems work
I'm sure my mix-up comes from the kanji "義" (righteousness)
Same with "集" (gather) — because of "気" (ki/spirit), I always turn the second stroke into a horizontal line, and I just can't unlearn it now
Guess you either weren't listening or were out sick that day
Surprised that character even converts on a smartphone keyboard without turning into garbled text
I always figured the straight-through version was some kind of shortcut — figured people were just being lazy
Now that it's come up and I tried writing it myself, I honestly can't tell anymore which way I actually write it, lol
Well, can't help it. I just fudge it. I have zero confidence in my stroke order anymore
I can no longer write 様
I've got the yips for writing 様
True
Wang Xizhi is the one who turned oracle bone script into calligraphy as an art form, so it makes sense to follow his stroke order
At least for us Japanese who use kanji and classical Chinese writing
so they never really took hold — apparently they only caught on in the Meiji era, making them a fairly recent import
It's strange that an animal like that ended up in the zodiac — there's even a theory that the "sheep" in the zodiac was actually a goat. o/
Stroke order and all that — who cares
→ A modern Japanese-language dilemma over old-style characters with different stroke counts: "both are correct" vs. "wrong for teaching purposes"
https://togetter.com/li/2273188
Wait, wasn't it "sewage"?
The kanji "飛" (fly) — I just can't write it well no matter what
What's the trick to making it look balanced?
If you follow the correct stroke order and make a point of writing it big and wide, it starts looking clean
If the stroke order is off, people looking at it will sense something's wrong — balance included
Background and Points of Debate
The “separate style” of writing the right-hand side of “様” as two distinct strokes is closer to the old-style character “樣” used before kanji forms were standardized, and schools are said to have unified on the connected “straight-through style” starting in the 1950s. Some in the thread pointed out that Utsumi likely didn’t invent his own mistake — he may have inherited the older writing style from a teacher born before the war. At the same time, the thread blends two separate issues — “stroke order” and “character shape (joined vs. separated strokes)” — so some of the back-and-forth talks past itself. In fact, kanji like “心” (heart) and “飛” (fly) show similar cases where how a character is written, or its stroke order, differs from person to person due to changes in teaching over the decades or simple misremembering. The split between “it’s fine as long as the reader understands it” and “educational standards should be upheld” ultimately comes down to differing values about what standard to apply, rather than a simple question of right or wrong.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “Milk Boy’s Utsumi Confesses ‘Major Incident After Living 40 Years’ Over How to Write ‘様,’ Says ‘I Learned It Wrong’.”
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