An ad, burned still more soot-blackened by a recent fire than when I first encountered it, for butsudan family altars and funerary services, the now desperately faded late 1950s to early 1960s Cadillac hearse straight from a scene in Harold and Maude, decked out with elaborately customized bodywork inspired by the gaudiest of Shinto shrines these miya-gata reikyusha (宮型霊柩車, shrine-style spirit-coffin-vehicle) hearses are falling out of favor, perhaps because of their perceived vulgarity-some crematoria refuse to let them in-and perhaps because of their expense-around $250,000-and are being supplanted by plainer, duller and Western-inspired landau “funeral coaches”.Ī cornucopia of departing words and defunct characters adorn this sign for Mayamaya Shoten (馬山屋商店, Mayamaya Store, lower center): reading right to left across the top, 小間物 ( komabutsu, sundries), 化粧品, ( keshohin, cosmetics), 日用品 ( nichiyohin, daily goods), 雑貨ゑ ( zakka e, sundries, etc.) The first word for sundries, komabutsu, is being gently pushed aside by the second, zakka, while the mysterious ゑ (“e”) is a made-in-Japan hiragana character with a history of close to a millennium, variously pronounced as “we”, “e”, and “ye” in its long life, and which has officially been discarded since 1946, supplanted by え (“e”), although it must have lingered longer in the countryside, as this signboard is unlikely to be more than half-a-century old.
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