Perhaps a dozen or so posts have on top a box that emulates the style of an entry for a character in Kenneth G. Henshall’s 1988 book A guide to remembering Japanese characters. I have fond memories of using the book when I was studying Japanese, emulating it is just a bit of (hopefully harmless) fun.
Most visibly, I copy the layout and to some extend the usage of fonts. I also try to make the entries as short and to the point as those of Henshall (mostly) are. To a lesser extend I follow his writing style.
One feature of Henshall’s writing that I try to follow is his total lack of citations—but I cheated with that by adding footnotes. That is, in the text I follow Henshall style of not mentioning his source for some piece of information, but I will add the info in a footnote outside of the box.
Henshall states a lot of findings as if they are matters of fact, even when they are debatable. When even he can’t ignore that some finding might be questionable he might write something like “some scholars say” or “in the view of some scholars”, without ever mentioning them or their publications. I try to imitate that, but like I said, I will add a footnote to resolve the uncertainty.
Henshall writes the following about his sources in his acknowledgements:
In the research for this book I have been especially guided by the work of three of Japan's most highly regarded scholars in the field of kanji etymology, namely Tsunekata Kato, Katsumi Yamada, and Hideyuki Shindo. Those readers wishing to pursue further study of kanji are recommended to consult in particular their joint work Jigen Jiten (Etymological Dictionary of Kanji, Kadokawa, Tokyo, 2nd edition 1985), together with Katsumi Yamada's Kanji no Gogen (The Etymology of Kanji, Kadokawa, Tokyo, 1976).
I have a copy of the 1985 Jigen Jiten. I borrowed Katsumi Yamada’s Kanji no Gogen one time from the library, it looked very similar to Jigen Jiten. I find it hard to believe that Henshall didn’t use other sources as well, the information in Jigen Jiten is mostly very sparse.
Katō’s 1970 book kanji no kigen is very different. In it, frequently Katō reveals his reasoning and sometimes even his sources. I must assume that Henshall at least used that book as well, and probably other sources. So why didn’t he mention those in his acknowledgements?
I have some questions about the approach to analyzing characters that Henshall (following Katō and others) used, I will try to look at that later.
While I try to follow Henshall’s writing style to some extend, I can’t help falling back to my clunky not native English, partly because I want to make sharp distinctions that Henshall perhaps glosses over a bit. In particular the distinction between words and their written representation. I might use ugly phrases like “the word 馬” and “the graph 馬” to make this clear.
Henshall’s entries are short. When I research a character I find lots of relevant or otherwise interesting information that doesn’t fit in the imitation box. That’s why I mostly continue below the box with “Verbose explanation and references”.