Japanese Question!

[angharad]

I bought this Japanese typography book yesterday at the library booksale, and I want to find its record online at amazon.co.jp, for LibraryThing cataloguing purposes. Most of the title is this: "フリースタイルのエレメソト", but there are three Kanji preceding that. I tried searching for this phrase (which appears to mean "elements of freestyle"), and for both

Comments

[bonelesspuppy]

If you have Japanese keyboard support, you should be able to type the kanji in phonetically and choose from a list of what matches. If you don't know the readings of the kanji, you can look them up on this dictionary, or download NJ Star (which I've lost the link for) and use their "Insert Kanji by Radical" command to browse. Alternately, you could scan the cover, and I'll see if I can work out what the kanji are.

By the way, I couldn't get any results on amazon.co.jp, either, and Google was totally unhelpful. How old of a book is it?

[angharad]

Alternately, you could scan the cover, and I'll see if I can work out what the kanji are.

If you look at the Flickr photo I posted earlier today, you can see the spine halfway up the lefthand pile of books. I don't know whether the Kanji are really clear on that picture, though.

How old of a book is it?

Well, the Arabic numerals on the title page offer 1928, 1971, 1976 as options. Based on the binding, I'd say this copy is from the 70s, at least. I'd be searching for ISBN if I could see one. )=

[bonelesspuppy]

Yep, the Flickr photo is clear enough! The kanji are 日本字 (nihon ji), meaning "Japan Characters/Writing," I think.

Amazon is still no help, but I got this result by Googling for "日本字フリースタイル." Got a lot of results that way, in fact, including one on Yahoo Japan.

[angharad]

Japan Characters/Writing

That makes sense given the "lots of wacky typefaces" content.

but I got this result by Googling for "日本字フリースタイル."

Awesome! That looks like the one, so with the nicely English field labels, I can cut-and-paste that info into a manual LibraryThing record.