What do you call that thing again
From LibraryWiki
What do you call that thing again?
Do you know those roofed wooden signs on which Japanese government officials made a practice of posting announcements of new laws and ordinances for hundreds and hundreds of years? Exactly when was it that they abolished the practice?
If I only knew the name of the thing, I could look it up, in the Japanese Language Wikipedia for example, and find the answer to my initial question.
This is also a non-trivial problem. There are pictorial dictionaries (or "visual glossaries") for finding out the Japanese names of objects common in Western cultures (and objects of everyday material life of industrialized nations in general):
But when it comes to traditional Japanese cultural artifacts, getting from a visual image to the word that denotes it is not simple.
There are a few Japanese series in cultural anthropology including photographs where the objects are given glosses in Japanese (and sometimes even in English):
There also series of "history through pictures" that can be useful:
In this last book you will find images of things that look like the item in question, but there is no mention of the generic name for such things in the discussion of the photos.
These might be good too, but I haven't checked them yet:
In the front (or sometimes the back) of some dictionaries of Classical Japanese there are sections with illustrations of clothing, hairstyles, architecture, etc. that help sometimes.
For non-scholars, there's a wonderful pictorial encyclopedia of the material culture of Japanese literature:
One of the most obscure, but potentially informative resources might be this extensive collection of illustrated primers from pre-modern Japan:
If you knew the name of the thing, the word-index of 訓蒙図彙集成 would direct you to Vol. 18, pg. 77 and there you'd find the picture. But that's still no help to us.
All of the resources noted above involve browsing through images until you find what you're looking for (if you're lucky). There must be a more direct way to get from the image to the name of the thing.
Ultimately you might try to ask someone who knows, but the answer to this particular question is actually not the sort of thing that rolls off the tongue of your average 21st century Japanese speaker, even if they see the thing in question everyday on reruns of 水戸黄門.
If the only indexes of Japanese material culture we have all rely on language as the organizing principle, and we don't have the piece of language necessary to use the indexes, then what are we to do? One solution is back up and re-think the problem so we can use language to solve it. For example, think of a related word such as 標識 or 立て札 or 看板 and search for where these terms are grouped in a 類語辞典 (Japanese thesaurus). This is the one I used:
The next step is to read the definitions of the words in that semantic category. If you are persistent, you are likely to find a definition that matches your object, and when you see that this is part of an entry for the word 高札, then you will have solved the puzzle.
