I was never any good at writing beautiful kanji at the calligraphy lessons that was part of my brief attempt to learn Japanese at university. After years of almost no handwriting at all I soon started to wonder if those muscles in my hand that you need to have complete control of the pen might had become too weak to do it. But at least I'm pretty fast with a keyboard.

Those lessons were still a lot of fun as long as I wasn't writing myself and I instead could watch Kimura-sensei's flowing movements when she painted one beautiful sign after the other all made up of lines that narrowed at the right places in bends that was the perfect amount of non-perfect. It looked very easy when she did it of course.

One time Kimura-sensei brought lots of rice paper to class and said that we could all choose a word that she would paint and that we then could take it home as a gift. I think that was really sweet of her and I can't imagine the university was paying for it. The only problem was of course - what word to choose? Everyone were browsing through Japanese dictionaries to come up with something good, something that was both a good word and at the same time made up with kanji that looked good. People chose words like serenity, courage or hero. I really couldn't come up with anything I wanted at first. But then I had it. When I handed over the note with my word to Kimura-sensei she smiled and wrote:

任天堂

And now I can look at her graceful signs whenever I want, hanging on my living room wall they read: Nintendo.