I’m working hard to improve my reading ability, and I’m planning to translate more text here (or other places) as I finally become able to read text in Japanese. With that in mind I want to briefly explain something that came up in the Araki essay on Tomatsu I posted yesterday to American Photo 1.
Probably the strangest part of the essay is where Araki writes: “I was invited to the school as a teacher, though not to teach anything about mental thinking, just ‘finger thinking.'”
What’s happening here? Araki is making a joke. First, he says that he couldn’t teach “thought”: 思想, pronounced “shisou,” the combination of the characters for “think” and “thought.” Instead of “thought,” he taught something else, a made-up word: 指想, which is also pronounced “shisou,” but this is the combination of the characters for “finger” and “thought.” (Obviously he’s referring to pressing the shutter.)
Araki’s thinking is not a thinking-thinking; it’s a finger-thinking.