Turning Japanese

In your continuing quest to move to Tokyo, pick-up a job teaching English and meet some cute Japanese girl/guy while hanging out in a maid cafe in Akihabara we offer you this fine DIY Japanese Name Stamp Set. This custom rubber stamp kit allows you to write your name in Japanese Hiragana characters, then stamp your newfound moniker on everything in sight. Simply remove the appropriate rubber characters from the included sheet and slide them into the stamp, then ink up the pad and start stamping. You get two sheets of 225 characters each, one small font, one large font.

But how do you learn to write your name in Japanese... and what is this Hiragana you speak of? Glad you asked young otaku.

Japanese Character Primer
Japanese uses three different character systems, Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic based systems similar to our English alphabet and have only 71 characters each. In Hiragana and Katakana each character represents a sound. Hiragana is used primarily for writing Japanese words, while Katakana is used mostly for writing foreign words (the Japanese have borrowed many English words and changed them a bit to fit into their phonetic system... kind of like what we do with French words here in the USA.) Kanji has thousands of characters. Each Kanji can represent an object or idea, but can also be pronounced phonetically. Confused yet?

How to write your name in Hiragana
Look at the chart below and figure out how your name would best be pronounced using the Japanese syllables below. Then simply pick the correct sequence of characters matching the pronunciation you think is best and you're done! If you want to do your first and last name remember that in Japanese the last name comes first. Some people might be tempted to reverse the order of the characters since Japanese is read right-to-left. Actually this is incorrect. When the letters are arranged horizontally they are always read left-to-right, the same as in English. If your name has an "L" in it remember that "L" and "R" in Japanese are pronounced the same... kind of a L/R slur.

Product Features

• Create a custom Japanese stamp of your name in Hiragana
• Choose from small or large fonts
• 450 characters are included. Enough to make virtually any name.
• Includes stamp, ink pad, letters, ink and stamp rest
• Imported from Japan