Chuukaku.com

So, the question that has been no doubt on your mind since you approached this website, is what on earth does chuukaku mean? Well, as you can see on the nifty background of the site, chuukaku is the romanization (Roman alphabet spelling) of a Japanese word, and approximately translates to 'nucleus'. This website has the name as it refers to the site's place at the centre of my online presence. Packed in around the nucleus are my various academic endeavours, this blog, and various other information and ways of finding me.

One thing I really wanted to do when I got this site up and running was have a good look into the characters that made the word, aware that it is all too easy to make hilarious misinterpretations of Japanese characters (insert your own celebrity tattoo urban myths here). As you may have found out elsewhere on the site, I have a brief background in Japanese language study, and that, combined with working in a library, gives me a bit of a head start on finding out the meanings of characters (or kanji, as the word-symbols are called in Japanese).

The first character (the box on a stick, if you will) is one I'm already familiar with from my Japanese language days - we're pronouncing it 'chuu' in the word in question, but in fact characters in Japanese can have a number of different pronunciations. This is (at least partly) because the Japanese started off without a written language, and pretty much imported their characters wholesale from Chinese to refer to the sounds they already had in place. The character means 'middle' and is found in such combinations as chuugoku (middle country), which, probably because of the import, can be used to refer to China!

The second character can also be translated as nucleus, kernel, etc. when used independently, and the chuu mainly seems to be used for emphasis. The kaku bit is split into two parts. On the right is the symbol for 'the hog', the 12th sign of the zodiac. This can be used in different contexts, but apparently here it's referring to the acorns pigs eat. On the left is the condensed symbol for tree, and the tree being within the acorn leads to the idea of the nucleus - something large contained within something small. Hopefully this site will follow through even vaguely on this promise!

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