Introduction-1「What is Shodo?」

I am glad to introduce to you about our activity “hashiru.jp”.
This blog is our staff blog in our web-site.

This is how the “hashiru.jp” was started in this spring, 2009. We created an online shop with some merchandise including beautifully printed 'hashiru t-shirt' as well as other items to maintain some little revenue for the donation to disabled boys and girls in Japan. It is a Japanese-only website at this moment; we plan to provide English translation in the near future. I introduce Shodo to you at this time before explaining about our detail activity.


What is Shodo?:
Have you ever heard about Japanese traditional art called 'Shodo'?
The direct English translation for Shodo is "The Way of Writing". It is considered one of Japan's traditional cultural arts where an ink-dipped brush is used artistically to create Chinese kanji and Japanese kana characters.

Please take a look at this calligraphy.



The character means 'hashiru' which means 'to run' in Japanese. It even suggests more positive meaning than just to run. I thought. At the first glance of this unique brush writing, I couldn't help holding my breath by the strength and the power contained in this lettering.

Works of the Shodo calligraphy are admired for the accurate composition of their characters, of course, but also for the way the brush is handled in their creation, the shading of the ink, and the balanced placement of the characters on the paper.


The beauty of Shodo:
Unlike Western Calligraphy, which was intended to create a uniform handwriting style and suppress individuality, Shodo is intended to give words life and feeling, and styles vary greatly from person to person. All characters are written using various combinations of straight and curved lines. The characters are written in seconds, and there is no touching up or altering any part of a character after a brush stroke has been completed. We were impressed by this calligraphy and decided to create an online shop with some merchandise including beautifully printed 'hashiru t-shirt' in this spring, 2009.


I will introduce our detail activity to you next time.
Thank you very much for your time and thoughts.


Best regards,
H.Y&K.A
website: http://hashiru.jp/
mail:mail☆hashiru.jp