October 15th, 2017

Today I met someone with a tattoo on the right of his neck which read '家族母姉父'. In general, if one doesn't see any hirigana nor katakana it's safe to assume the text is Chinese. In Chinese, 家族 (jiāzú) means 'clan', and the next 3 characters are 'mǔ zǐ fù' meaning 'mother, elder sister, father'. However, 姉 is not a character used in modern Chinese, besides as an occasional phonetic element. My guess was that perhaps the characters were intended to be read phonetically: 'mǔzǐfù clan'. I asked, and was informed that it was a Japanese haiku written in kanji. In Japanese, 姉 is still used to mean sister, while '家族' means family. Thus, the characters are read as 'family: mother, elder sister, father' and pronounced as 'kazoku haha ane chichi'. Though, is this truly a haiku? A traditional Japanese haiku consists of 17 音 (on), organised in 5-7-5 (or sometimes 11 organised in 3-5-3). These 5 characters consist of 9 音 (ka-zo-ku ha-ha a-ne chi-chi), so they do not form a haiku in the traditional sense. Although today the rules have become quite relaxed, with much shorter 'monokus' occasionally popping up. Even the old masters would occasionally bend the rules. Ultimately, the only consistent definition of a haiku is that they are concise, and in that sense the tattoo certainly qualifies.

Bonus:
Noteworthy is that the Japanese concept of 音 do not always correspond to syllables. Paired vowels (such as おう 'ou') count as two 音, but represent a single English syllable. A similar disagreement occurs when a vowel ends with 'n' (なん 'nan').

-E