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Here is the word! The radicals in Jisho don’t make sense to me. I found it by selecting the 一 radical and looking under what I thought was the stroke count (although it definitely has 10 strokes as far as I can tell? but it’s listed under 9 for some reason).
unihan at it again!
祓 ← Japanese style
祓 ← Chinese style
< ruby lang = ‘ja-JP’ >祓< /ruby>
< ruby lang = ‘zh’ >祓< /ruby>
See this thread if you want to see it in the consistently Japanese format:
(but to summarize it’s because variants with the same meaning and stroke count etc. are stored in the same place, adding Japanese to your list of preferred languages in your browser will correct the display)
(at least I remember seeing stroke count was supposed to be one of the criteria… It does seem like it’s 10 in other sources for 祓 - not sure why Jisho says 9, but maybe it has something to do with the variant as well)
Thank you! I’ve just gotten used to certain characters being different, but not that different, haha. The fix in that thread is very quick and worked like a charm!
It’s weird that the stroke count and radicals in Jisho point to the Chinese version of the kanji, though.
Edit: Both the English language and Chinese language version of Wiktionary claim 10 strokes for the Chinese variation. On the other hand, all of the stroke-order diagrams I can find for the Chinese character show 9 strokes. Well, either way, the original problem is solved, and I am going to stop going down this rabbit hole since this is not a kanji thread lol.
There’s definitely something I’m not getting. If I put 地縛 into Jisho, it only comes up with “creeping lettuce,” which would make the title “Creeping Lettuce-Boy Hanako-Kun”. What am I missing here (or does the original Japanese actually just refer to an odd plant in the title)?
The definition for 地縛霊 is the more relevant one I think.
ghost bound to a specific physical location (usu. where death occurred)
So 地縛少年 is like that but with a 少年.
The original title emphasizes the hook that the ghost 花子 in this version is a boy, and I guess for the English title since a ghost named Hanako haunting a bathroom isn’t a common legend outside of Japan, they chose to emphasize the toilet aspect instead.
if you think about it another way, the individual kanji can give you a clue too. 地 means earth and 縛 means a binding or tie so 地縛 is earth-bound as in bound to earth unable to move on.
As a total tangent, I played a ton of a ghost-management PC game called Ghost Master as a kid, and in that game’s lingo, to place ghosts you had to attach them to “fetters” in the environment, and different types of ghosts could only attach to different kinds of fetters. Like some could only be fettered to human remains, some to electrical appliances, some to thoroughfares, bodies of water, etc. So there was strategy to placing ghosts so that the humans you were trying to scare would always be confronted by something scary no matter where they ran…
So that can’t help but spring to my mind with this title!
The word “fetter” (and “thoroughfare” for that matter) is permanently burned into my brain because of that game…
Perhaps the manga will do the same for words like 地縛霊 and 祓い
Been in the ABBC reading through Teasing Master Takagi-san and just took a look at some pages in the first chapter here and it seems fairly doable so I think I’ll join in when this starts - no harm in trying I guess
glad it’s not a kanji I ‘know’…