Historic Hood River
Carp Kite
Notes
Grace has a fun item artifact for us today. This fish-shaped banner was reportedly purchased in Japan around 1920 by John Hungerford Jr., who is the uncle of the donor. The kite would have been a part of Boys’ Day which was changed to Children’s Day in 1948. As a part of the celebration, these koinobori (carp streamers) would be flown outside of homes to symbolize strength and perseverance, as carp instinctively swim upstream.
For fun I pumped some of the text we see printed on the kite through Google Translate and Apple’s built in translation software. I tried each string forward and backwards, because someone previously told us the order of printing changed sometime in this era. For one string of text I get “The original founder of the swastika’s ear-turning technique” or “Ancestor origin” or “Sogen’s ear lifts the mackerel” or “The originator of the eel”. For the other I get “Two and a Half Ken” or “Half-time purchase” or “Half between” or “Hanma”. This exercise reminds me of this Monty Python sketch.
Melody Shellman
What’s even more fun, a number of pre-WWII characters were simplified or discarded in the post-war rush to modernization.