This page contains a few notes designed to give a picture of the history and organization of dancheong painting.

Evolution of Dancheong Patterns

Three Kingdoms Period

Dancheong, or the decorative elements that were to evolve into dancheong, generally appear to have reached Korea from the north. In other words, dancheong is not a Silla or peninsular invention so much as the continuation of a northeast or central Asian tradition.

It is in Goguryeo tomb paintings, therefore, that the earliest record of the patterns that evolved into dancheong can be found.

This document is a transcription of a message found in a bottle floating in the Hangang River in October, 2006. Doubtless this is yet another attempt by the Korean establishment to distract attention from deeper economic woes.

A long-expected Journey

Unah had spent literally weeks planning what she would eat in Korea and writing down addresses of interesting restaurants in a notebook. She also planned a gruelling holiday itinerary -- one day in Seoul, then a trip to the northeast coast and a visit to the DMZ, then down to the southeast to Yeongcheon (the 'town' in which her father lives, you may recall), then a day in local university town Daegu to have a hanbok made for me, then a weekend on the volcanic island of Jeju with her father, brother, sister, sister's husband, and sister's two daughters, then back to Yeongcheon and finally, rather surprisingly, a few days of unplanned free time.

Introduction

The purpose of this list is this: given the name of a character set, find out a little bit about it.
For each character set, the following information is stored:

• The 'main' name of the character set. Where possible, this is the name of the standard it is defined in.
• Other names, nicknames, and aliases by which the set is known.
• Whether the 'character set' is actually a character set or an encoding system, or both. In some cases the entry is for a family of character sets.

In Seoul, you're never without an RPS opponent:

I'd be quite interested to know when these first appeared. They've been around for several years -- I think they date back to the late 90's, which would almost correspond to the brief Japanese RPS boom.

From an RPS history point of view, it's interesting that 'scissors' is the new style scissors rather than the first-finger-and-thumb style. The machines are definitely made in and for Korea, though, so I suppose this is another nail in the coffin of the old style gesture.

Unicode in Japan

Guide to a technical and psychological struggle

---

This is not a final version and probably contains numerous stylistic and factual disasters. Please correct my faults!

Purpose of this Document

The purpose of this document is to provide background information for the discussion of Unicode in the context of Japanese information processing. Because this has become an emotional subject for some people, misinformation has become common and it's hard to avoid heated debates on topics like 'Why Unicode can never ever work' or 'Why Unicode is the answer to all life's problems'. Hopefully this guide can help distinguish fact from dogma -- and it could also provide useful ammunition, whatever side you want to argue on.

This page contains links to free Ainu language resources currently available on the net. At the moment these resources are rather scarce and are often in Japanese.

In the past, the books of John Batchelor (a scholar of Ainu working around the start of the 20th century) were available online from Google but unfortunately this seems to no longer be the case.

Word lists / Dictionaries

The Saman Ainu Dictionary(浦河アイヌ語辞典)

This large word list (in Japanese) is broken up by topic rather than alphabetically, which can make finding words a challenge. It's intended for use in education.

23, Crundle Road, the erstwhile home of Ms. Park Choi Hui, is an important address in the history of London's Korean and Nuristani communities. Recently I have gained access to the house and completed a Sketchup model showing the house and garden as they were during Ms. Park's lifetime.

Plans, elevations and views prepared from the model are presented here in the hope that they can be of assistance to anyone trying to recreate the drama of Ms. Park's life and achieve an insight into her extraordinary mind.

If you are researching Ms Park's life or work, or were a friend or colleague, then please feel free to get in touch with me and I will send a copy of the model.

I would like to express my gratitude to Sir Clive James for helping gain access to the house, and for agreeing to omit certain details of Ms. Park's life from his recent book, Cultural Amnesia.

A hwacha is a multiple rocket launcher from the 15th century, and also a symbol of ingenuity and resourcefulness and, optionally, Korean independance. It looks like this:

The purpose of this page is to provide a very simple guide to some of the grammar and constructions found in Japanese haiku, for those who can maybe bluff their way in modern Japanese on a good day but don't have the inclination to become poetry experts.

Unfortunately almost all Japanese poetry is either genuinely written in old Japanese, or looks as if it were. This guide therefore might be useful for answering questions such as:

• When it says 「歌ふ」is that the same as 「歌う」 and do I pronounce the 'h'?
• When it says 「ありけり」, is that part of the verb 'aru' or what?

Painter Custom Palette Files

If you use Fractal Design/Metacreations/Procreate/Corel Painter a lot -- and you should -- you'll use lots of custom palettes. After the problems of Painter 8, versions IX and X of Painter have a highly effective custom palette system -- except for one thing: brushes on a custom palette have the icon of their Brush Category, and nothing to show what particular brush they are. Maddening.

Help is at hand! As luck would have it, the PAL file format (i.e. the files that are created when you choose to 'Export' a custom palette from the Organizer) contain an actual copy of the icon art for each item on the palette, in an easily edited format! By editing these files you can (with a bit of effort) get whatever icons you like on your custom brush palettes.