3D Kanji Dreams Are Within Reach

Over the weekend, a friend sent me a link to a Spoon & Tamago blog post about designer Hideo Kanbara’s three dimensional hiragana project. Kanbara’s own website allows you to see あ in virtual 3D and it is quite impressive. While my informant didn’t explain why he sent the link, I’m certain it has something to do with a short passage in The Samurai Poet when a young Ishikawa Jozan (a future shuji master) dreams of kanji as three dimensional objects. I’m glad Kanbara was able to provide his proof-of-concept visualization. Here’s the excerpt if you’re interested.

Another writing lesson that my mother tried to impress upon me was that kanji were not static two dimensional characters on the page, but living three dimensional embodiments of the ideas they represent. This was a difficult thing for me to appreciate. How could these black lines on a page take a form? 

My confusion lasted until the night I had an unusual dream. The boxy character for 'mouth' 口 was lying flat on the white, sandy ground. Without warning, it stood up in the sand as though carpenters were pulling up the wall of a house with invisible ropes. It was then the thickness of the character revealed itself. The seeped ink extended horizontally like frozen carp banners blown by a perfectly constant wind. I entered the character and emerged on the other side to see the kanji for 'person' 人 stride by me while another rested under a shady 'tree' 木. 'Convex' 凸 and 'concave' 凹 were as deep as they were wide and tall. 'Tea' 茶 seemed like a house I could walk inside. There may have been others, but I could not recall them in the morning. However, the dream affected the way I perceived and wrote kanji. I could not show the depth of each character on a flat page, but my sense of each kanji's architecture helped me balance them better inside the practice squares.