Help me decipher this?

Bought this cute little ramen bowl at my Asian grocery store and am having trouble reading some of the kanji. I can tell that the right says 招き猫 (although the 猫 was borderline unrecognizable to me, but I can’t for the life of me id the others. Any ideas?

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On the left side under the collar is 福.

Having trouble with the ones on the yellow thingy, except the middle one which is 万.

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Here’s a closer image.

福 definitely makes sense since the cat is apparently a good luck charm. Really curious about the others.

It looks like 両万仏 (although the strokes are wrong so I can’t be sure), but that’s not a word I can find anywhere, so I have low confidence that those are indeed the characters.

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I was just about to write that the last one looked like (ほとけ)

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It’s probably supposed to be read from right to left, cause it seems to be for some amount of money… ??万両 (りょう used to be the counter for money, in the Edo era). But I can’t tell what number the first character would be :pleading_face:

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Oh! I wanna add that I think the golden sack is a money bag :sparkles:

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Maybe it’s 什万両? Jisho brings up 什 as meaning “ten,” so maybe it’s just written poorly and looks like 仏…? I know for sure 万両 is correct since I’ve got a 招き猫 with 千万両 on it; it must be written right-to-left on this bowl for some reason.

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It’s not uncommon to see older and/or more traditional things written right-to-left.

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On this 招き猫, I can see 亿万両. It seems to match with what is written on your bowl.
image

亿 is the simplified version of 億 in Chinese.

Searching up 亿万両 gives me images of Chinese pastries. They may be considered lucky cookies, I don’t know.

Searching up 億万両 gives me images of Japanese pastries/cookies. I’ve never seen these before either.

It’s written right-to-left is my guess. I’m not an expert, so don’t ask me why it’s using the Chinese 亿 instead of 億 on a bowl that has hiragana on it. Or why it’s written on the gold ingot.

Edit:

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I think it’s just supposed to be 億万両.

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亿万両 = 億万両=おくまんりょう= A crap ton of money. :slight_smile: 両 was a currency predating 円.

Wikipedia article on 両

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Wow thanks everyone! This actually ended up being way more interesting than I thought it would!

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