Home / ATypI Tech Talks 2022

E/moji Graphy—The Essence of Kanji, Visually 

emoji. You surely associate this term with bright ­yellow smileys. Yet, emoji means picture writing, or pictogram, with the Japanese word holding two words: e 絵 for a picture, and moji 文字 for a character, a letter, or a complete writing system.

kanji. You might have heard that kanji—the Japanese term for Chinese characters—is ideographic; that one can always ‘read’ the meaning within the form. That’s a myth! The main body of kanji is phono-logographic.

e/moji graphy—the essence of kanji, visually. The third volume in Mariko Takagi’s series, following “Hanzi Graphy” (in English) and “Kanji Graphy” (in German), brings new clarity and terminology—an indispensable guide for people interested in the intersections of writing, reading, typography, and culture.

In this presentation, Takagi aims to introduce the leading arguments of her latest book, published in March 2022.

Speaker

Mariko Takagi

Associate Professor Doshisha Women's College of Liberal Arts

Mariko Takagi is a German-Japanese typographer, an author, and designer of books and an educator. She acts as an intermediary between the Western and Japanese cultures in general—and between Latin letters and Japanese/Chinese characters in particular. Takagi spent six years in Hong Kong, where she worked as an assistant professor in the academy of visual arts at Hong Kong Baptist University. In April 2017, Takagi moved to Kyoto to continue her work as an associate professor and researcher at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts.