Japanese Color Blending
Published 18 years, 11 months pastWhat is it about the Japanese that they loooove to blend colors?
Lest you think I’m indulging in some sort of bizarre racial stereotyping, I submit for your consideration the Technorati search results for blogs and other sites pointing to my Color Blender. The Blender been moderately popular ever since its release, but so far as I can tell, the Asian market is just eating it up. If I see a new Japanese site appear in my egorati feed, the odds are 49 out of 50 that it’ll be linking to the Blender.
So what’s the deal there? Anyone have insights, specuation, or even translations that might shed some light on this little enigma?
(Note: it turns out that these are Chinese blogs using Japanese fonts, and not Japanese sites as I originally thought. I’m leaving the original entry intact rather than update it. Still, this means that the essence of the original question remains, even if the geography was off by a bit.)
Comments (13)
What do your referrer logs say?
FYI, the first few pages of that Technorati search list no Japanese blogs. There are plenty of Chinese blogs, as well as blogs from France and Chile.
I clicked on one blog that used a Japanese character, but it ended up being a Chinese blog that used the hiragana for decoration. And it looks good! Red China is winning the ASCII Art Race!
I checked the font to see which language it was, and it came up a Japanese font, so… I made the obvious assumption. Chinese, then? Interesting.
The word “Japanese” caught my attention, but like Mike said earlier, these blogs are written in Chinese. I can’t even distinguish whether they are in Cantonese or Mandarin though. While conflicts between the Chinese and the Japanese still exist, there are lots of Japanese anime and pop culture fans in Taiwan. This is nothing racial I think. Some people like some stuff. I am not those anime fans, but I still think your tool is nice. I hope that somebody read Chinese can give you more ideas of what they are actually talking about your tool.
Quinn, written Chinese is the same for Mandarin and Cantonese (there are people who write EXTREMELY EXTREMELY EXTREMELY informally in Cantonese colloquials, but I’d consider it more Chinese ebonics than anything else. As for animes, it’s just as hot in Hong Kong as it is in Taiwan, and China aired major Japanese animes as early as the 80’s. HOWEVER, do not tie Taiwan and Japan in any way in front of partisan Chinese, b/c the relationship btwn those two places has a lot to do w. Japanese occupation of that island. You DON’T want to go there. ;-)
The Asian blogs on Technorati are (mainland) Chinese, not Japanese… though the one using the Hiragana isn’t just decoration. The Japanese “の” in used in place of the Chinese “之”, which has the same meaning, which is more than what can be said of “branding” in the English speaking west abusing the extended Latin and sometimes Cyrillic characters in trying to fake a Germanic/Nordic/Russian feel.
As to why the colour blender is so popular, that is a bit of an enigma… perhaps droves of teenage Chinese girls are using it to colour co-ordinate their wardrobes? :D
Eric, dude that color blender rocks! Thanks for another handy tool to make my job easier…
My Japanese flat made can’t tell French from Spanish, but I can’t tell Chinease from Mandarin.
You can recognise Japanese because it has a lot of simpler characters in it. Japanese writing is composed of Kanji (Chinese) and Kana (Japanese) characters, while Chinese only uses Kanji. The Kana characters are much simpler. Kanji characters also rarely use round shapes, while Hiragana (a subset of Kana) does use them.
E.g. this would be the Japanese word for “I” using Kana: わたし
And this is the same word using Kanji: 私
A trademark character by which you can easily recognise Japanese is の, indicating a posessive relationship between two words (私の車 = “My car”), which is used very frequently.
~Grauw
I’ve been thinking about explanations for the popularity of your colour blender in Chinese blogs. Internet access is heavily censored and controlled in China and many use blogging as a method of free speech. In which case they will all be reading each other’s blogs. So if one blogger finds your blender and posts a link, others will pick it up.
Now this could just be because the blender is ace or it could be to get people to Meyerweb via an innocuous link. Now that would be really cool if it was a sort of code to alert Chinese bloggers to a site that shows what freedom of speech is all about.
what a nifty tool!
I’d love to have color blender extended to both sides of the “spectrum”, so that colors darker as well as lighter than the two given ones are calculated. I don’t know a thing about java script – perhaps somebody else can help?
This is nothing racial I think. Some people like some stuff. I am not those anime fans, but I still think your tool is nice.