Remember “Bloom Again” buy Nau Lee/ Lee Nau ? I found it!

https://www.mapianist.com/shee..._fragment_=&q=victor

https://youtu.be/OBfMvJoUvAw

Jodi, I bought it! (even though it's a sketchy website

One other question for you please while you’ve been paged. It’s not piano related:

Why do Japanese car license plates have the prefecture name in Japanese characters and the license plate no. is in English numbers? I’ve noticed it in Japanese movies. You’d think both would be in Japanese characters.

quote:

Why do Japanese car license plates have the prefecture name in Japanese characters and the license plate no. is in English numbers? I’ve noticed it in Japanese movies. You’d think both would be in Japanese characters.

It's funny that I actually have an answer for this (it may or may not be correct...

I believe it's because when license plates were first put into use, the technology for getting kanji (characters) onto the plates was not as advanced as it is now, and so doing arabic numerals was cheaper and/or faster. Originally, license plates didn't have the location specified, it was just the numbers.

As car ownership because more common, they needed more information on the plates and that pushed the tech forward. So place names were written in characters, but the use of arabic numbers persisted.

The reason I "know" this (again, I could be wrong about the details) is because the technology improved while I was living in Japan and I saw the quality of the font used on the license plates improve when I got a new car one year.

It was actually a big topic of discussion because the prefecture where I lived has one of the more complicated characters for its name: 愛媛. The older style used a font that was not very attractive and some people thought it was hard to read. When the tech improved, the font was soooo much better, it was all anyone talked about!

I googled and found this image comparing the two. The top shows the font that was in use when I got my first car in Japan, the bottom one shows the current font, which came into use in 2003:



Now of course the old font looks retro-cool, and the person who posted this imagine writes that they like the older font better.

By the way, another reason for the use of arabic numbers might on license plates just be because Japan had been using arabic for a pretty long time, probably from the Meiji era onward.

Glad I am not Asian. Would never have been able to read/write those characters.

It is Greek to me.

Thank you, ShiroKuro.