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Her Girl Power tattoo...

 13th September 1998
About Melanie
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Oh Dear...
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What does 'snog' mean?
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   OK, after many email discussions with numerous people, a lot of head scratching, and finally a visit to some online English-Chinese and English-Japanese dictionaries, the definitive answer as to whether that tattoo is Chinese or Japanese can now be given...

It's Chinese!

No it isn't...

It's Japanese!!!

Actually, it's both. How? It's using the Chinese characters for woman and strength, as we can see here:

The actual tattoo...

Tattoo closeup

And how the Chinese write (it's pronounced "nyoo lee") "Woman" and "Strength"...

Chinese pictograms

Now the Japanese, as I understand it (and bear in mind I'm no languages expert, so if I'm getting stuff wrong, blame Encarta for giving me false information :-) use four different written forms of their language.
There are three phonetic forms - Hiragana, Katakana and Romaji. The first two use characters similar in appearance to other Oriental characters, formed with a handful of mostly curving pen strokes, whereas the third form uses the Roman (Western) alphabet.
There is also one non-phonetic form - Kanji. This is the one we're interested in here, as it uses the Chinese ideograms, and thus looks the same as Chinese.
However, although Kanji looks the same as Chinese, we must remember that it is not Chinese, and so the pronounciation - "onna chikara" - is totally different. So I suppose that in order to find out once and for all whether it's supposed to be Chinese or Japanese, we'd have to ask Melanie how she'd pronounce it...

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