5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Reference Book, March 24, 2006
This review is from: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Japanese Family Crests (Paperback)
If you're into anything Japanese then this is a very good reference book to have lying nearby. It catalogs thousands of family crests and they're indexed by motif, which makes it relatively painless to look a crest up. Do be advised that all the crest names in this tome are in katakana (Japanese syllable symbols) so you will need familiarity with katakana (or yet another handy reference tome at your side) in order to determine what family each crest represents.
Dollar for dollar, though, you cannot get a better deal than this book which has about 400 pages worth of crests, with 20 crests per page. Each crest appears twice, though, so it comes to about 4000 crests, all told.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Wonderful Resource...with one Fault, November 3, 2006
This review is from: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Japanese Family Crests (Paperback)
This is a WONDERFUL resource for those who are looking for information on Japanese Family Crests (or "mon"). The book groups the different crests by "type" such as crests of plants, animals, insects and things like everyday objects. Also there are many examples grouped by specific things, like those crests of the "ume" or "plum" blossom, of which there are many variations.
The weak point of this book is that the family names that these crests belong to are only shown in Japanese Kanji and there is no English translation, so if you are trying to do research on a specific family's (or business' crest as some businesses later in Edo history and pre-WWII Japan used crests as well, an example being the large solid "circle" in white on the lamps and such of the geisha district of the "Gion" in Kyoto) and you do not read kanji then you will not be able to figure out which family or business the crest belonged to.
I would have given this resource book five stars if they had translated the kanji of the names that belong to the crests (at least those that are well known, such as the various samurai daimyo family crests and of course the Tokugawa family crest, etc.), but since they did not, I'm only giving this book a four out of five stars.
As far as I can tell though, it is the ONLY reasonably priced book currently being published that has ANY English language in it at all on this subject and which is so full of the actual pictures of the crests, which makes it pretty invaluable if you are trying to match crests on antique kimono (which is what I originally bought it for) and you can find a way to scan the kanji under the crest and then send it to someone that does read it so that you can find out where your kimono (or other antique item) came from.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
mom, December 18, 2011
This review is from: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Japanese Family Crests (Paperback)
Great book so many diffrent family crest! only problem with this book is it's all in Japanese! so we had to wait until a family member could translate it for us.
Other wise it's a great book.
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