About the Artist: Eri Takase was born and raised in Osaka, Japan and has trained in traditional Japanese calligraphy since the age of six - devoting her life to the art. In 1989, she was awarded the rank of Shihan (or Master) by two of Japan's most prestigious calligraphic societies. And Master Takase is among the few to have won several best of category awards in national competitions in Japan with her work having been displayed in the Osaka Museum of Arts. To view Master Takase's award winning art, please visit Traditional Japanese Calligraphy.

Since 1995, Master Takase has been living and working in the United States. Her art has sold all over the world as custom art, on commercial products, in books, magazines, and in film. Her style of Japanese calligraphy has been described as refined and cultured. And after a lifetime of studying traditional calligraphy, Master Takase has devoted herself to adapting the art of Japanese Calligraphy to new mediums and methods and the results are simply breathtaking.

Shop at StockKanji.com with Confidence

A Reputation You Can Trust In creating this website and in offering these designs for sale over the Internet, we are asking you to trust us in many ways. Here we would like to tell you what we have done to try and earn your trust. First off, we have been in business since 1995 with our flagship and informational website Takase.com. Also Eri Takase has been published in dozens of books and magazine articles and you have probably seen her designs in an ASICS marketing campaign, in a computer game, a movie, or perhaps on a product on your grocery shelf. She is well respected in the industry and has been for more than a decade. Even with all this, we wanted to talk here about what we have done and what we will do so that you will be comfortable in trusting us with your business.

Translations You Can Trust One concern that we have aggressively addressed is the accuracy of our translations. While we want you to trust our translations, we recognize that most people that do not know Japanese will want to be extra cautious. We have gone to great lengths to make sure that each translation is absolutely correct including the use of native Japanese and English bilingual translators, but we did not stop there. On each page is a link to one or more additional references, including links to independent dictionaries and, when appropriate, wikipedia articles. This means that with a click of the mouse you can check the translations for yourself against completely independent sources.

And, if you still have concerns or questions, you are always welcome to Contact Us directly. We want you to be as happy with the translation as you are with the beauty of Master Takase's art.

Standard Name Translations Names in Japanese is a huge part of this website and is something we are especially proud of. For those not familiar with Japanese, there seems to be some confusion and we have gone to great lengths to explain the different methods and to use only translations that are standard.

There are four ways to translate names to Japanese (see How to Write Names in Japanese) but only one, a phonetic translation to katakana is standard. This is the translation method that is used in dictionaries and encyclopedias and the way, for example, your name would be written on your bank statement in Japan. For this reason we have focused on a phonetic translation to katakana and to a lesser degree in hiragana on this website.

In creating the translation we have done several things that no other website or resouces has done:

First, we show the pronunciation that we use for the name. This is often a problem on websites as names can have several different pronunciations. For example, the name Jan can be pronounced either JAN or YAHN. And each would be rendered differently in Japanese. We make sure it is absolutely clear which pronunciation is being translated.

Second, we have cross-referenced translations with the databases of three different sources including a popular movie database, a news source database, and a celebrity magazine database. And we have shown, when available, famous people that use the exact same translation that we use on the site.

Third, there are cases where a name can have several possible translations. This does not mean that any are wrong it just means they are different. In these cases we do searches on frequency of use so that we list the more commonly used version.

And finally, while we have hundreds of names in our catalog we also offer Special Order Names in Japanese so you can order any first name that is not in the catalog and we can have the name to you usually within a single business day.