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ROYAL MILK TEA
2002. acrylic on paper and plywood
219 x 21 x 3.6 cm
Photo: Keizo Kioku
Courtesy: Mizuma Art Gallery
Copyright ©2002 Ujino Muneteru,
All rights reserved.

I think at first probably the words were created as name for drink item.
Compared to the colors of national flag of England, red is moretowards vermilion color and blue is more towards purple it is converted into slightly differently colors to give an impression of Japanese tradition.
UJ

Nippon Series

This is the series of wrong English expression delineated in Japanese Katakana (the square form of Kana) pictographs developed from onomatopoeic words in Japanese comics. The core of the series is formed on the basis of my personal views regarding Katakana's nature, it's positioned as the letter to express imported words in the Japanese education I received, and also, it has much effects on the poor English ability of Japanese people.

The title of this series is 'Nippon series'. It is derived from the wrong usage of English found in Japanese professional baseball (it is notable that the Japanese baseball is designed to be seen with eating dinner.)  which is imported from US and has been the most popular sport in Japan since the end of the war. The 'Nippon series' contains the related issues to the concept of Love Arm 4 (1997).

The basic concept of this Nippon series can be regarded as my construction of the workings of Katakana letters, and figuring out the several problems of the words' translation, which occur when we Japanese import the Western words.

The Japanese notation has a rare and complicated style in the world which possesses at the same time the Kanji (Chinese letters) as an ideograph and the Hiragana as a phonogram, which was derived from Kanji.

The roles of each letter are divided clearly and the Katakana, which is the main theme of this series, is allotted the role to express words of foreign origin.

However, we can find some words which gained their own new meanings apart from the original, getting Japanese-style pronunciation expressed in Katakana without perfect trancelations of meaning. Most of these Katakana words seem odd (funny), as if they are not concidered seriously. But it is because Katakana can also become the function of a filter against things from foreign countries. That's to say, the existence of Katakana lets the Japanese people possess its own identity.

The title 'Nippon Series' also describes the final games to decide the championship team in professional baseball, which is the most popular sport in Japan. The words, which appear in Japanese baseball inported from America before the war, are seemingly English, but most of them cannot have any English function, and become the wrong expressions, to be understood with different meanings.