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Re: OT: strange glyphs at Benihana

From:Shreyas Sampat <ssampat@...>
Date:Monday, November 6, 2006, 23:15
Mark J. Reed wrote:

> OK, so in our local Benihana restaurant I noticed on the wall six > woodcuts of large single glyphs. Each one includes five vertical > lines with various pairs of them connected by a horizontal crossbar. > Sometimes the vertical lines between outer connected lines are also > touching the crossbar, and sometimes they are shortened so as not to. > > Any idea what these might be? At first I thought they might be some > variant of I Ching hexagrams, but as there are only five lines, not > six, I don't know what the correspondence might be. And I suspect the > fact that there were a total of six exemplars might be significant as > well. > > I wish I'd thought to bring a camera... >
Actually these are a code for what I seem to recall was an incense game played in the Heian era. Here's one web reference - http://spectacle.berkeley.edu/~fiorillo/texts/topictexts/faq/faq_genjimon.html -shreyas