johno  on October 15th, 2008

Some of them very roughly follow the forms of the original kanji (Japanese characters). Thanks for sharing.

primerg  on October 15th, 2008

my pleasure thanks for visiting.

dan  on November 4th, 2008

it is more like chinese character

Eyedunno  on November 29th, 2008

That’s because they are Chinese characters. Japanese people use them too. This is more of a graphic design thing than anything though.

The characters used don’t match the meaning 100%. For example, the characters used for “lemon” (檸, half of 檸檬), “grapes” (葡, half of 葡萄), “apple” (檎, half of 林檎), and others are just one character of a two-character compound.

In the case of the ones used for “shrimp”, “sausage”, and “dumpling”, the characters don’t even carry that meaning on their own.

老 means “elderly”, and 海老 (sea old) is used for “shrimp”, presumably because the whiskers make them look like old men.

詰 means “to stuff in”, and 腸詰め (intestine stuffing) is used for sausage, because that’s how sausage is made.

And 団 means a group or a cluster; dumplings are 団子 (cluster child) in the sense that dumplings are small clumps of food.