I tried to translate inscription on teapot

[grendel67]

I tried to translate inscription I think it is this Harosho Kukuma Hisashi Yasushima Tsuge. But I don't know if I have it written correctly. Any help would be great

 

[Toritoribe]

Where did you find it? It's written by the one who actually don't know kanji/Chinese characters.

 

[grendel67]

Are you talking about the writing or my translation of it? I could be wrong and its not Japanese.

 

[Toritoribe]

I'm talking about the writing itself, as I wrote "it's written" in my previous post.
You don't think it's Japanese, and nevertheless you ask to translate it in a Japanese forum... ("Hisashi" and "Tsuge" are typical Japanese names, by the way. There is no kanji that can be read "Tsuge" there, though.)

 

[grendel67]

I posted it because I thought it was Japanese by the style of decoration on the teapot and some of the writing. If I didn't think it was Japanese I would not have posted it to a Japanese Forum . But when you wrote" It's written by the one who actually don't know kanji/Chinese characters." I thought then maybe it wasn't Japanese after all and I didn't figure out any of the characters correctly.

 

[Toritoribe]

I wrote "Chinese characters" because it's just not Japanese kanji, but not Chinese hanzi or Korean hanja, either. Frankly speaking, it's fake.

 

[lincstreff]

Whether or not it is fake, it seems to me to have been written by someone with some knowledge of the Chinese characters, rather than by someone just imitating them.

I cannot decipher the first character, but the remaining characters appear to be:
邑 熊 恒 泰 自 造, although I am not certain about the third one (恒).

The inscription strikes me as most likely being Chinese (or possibly Korean), but not at all likely to be Japanese. The meaning of the final two characters together is "self made", suggesting to me
that an earlier part of the inscription includes a person's name. Perhaps that name is
熊恒泰.

That is the best that I can do.

 

[Toritoribe]

I think the writer would want to write the first character as 兼. I don't think the one who has knowledge about kanji/Chinese characters writes the right side of 熊 like that as well.

自造, reading mizukara/onozukara tsukuru, is used in 漢文 style sentence also in Japanese. Furthermore, 恒泰 Tsuneyasu is a relatively common Japanese male give name, so 邑熊恒泰 Murakuma Tsuneyasu can be a Japanese name, too. Anyway, I don't think it's written by someone who really know Chinese characters.

 

[lincstreff]

Actually, it was precisely because of the way the 「熊」 character was written that I concluded that the author of the inscription knew about Chinese characters. This way of writing the upper part of this character is a known alternate form. Notably, this is the way the Honnouji (本能寺) temple customarily writes it name, as can be confirmed with an online search.
The following two photos demonstrate what I am referring to. In each of these photos, you can observe the special way of writing this character in at least two places.
http://www.musubi-an.jp/Kyoto-like-photo/img/assets_c/2013/07/写真-thumb-1632x1224-1207.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ja/a/af/本能寺3340.JPG

 

[Toritoribe]

Ah, I see. I didn't know 能/熊 has that kind of 異体字. (I googled about 異体字 of 熊 before posting my previous reply, but couldn't get the information about it at that time.) Wiktionary has an interesting explanation about it.

江戸時代（康煕字典が広まる前）まで伝統的に使われてきた字形で、現在の字形が広まったのは明治時代以降である（『解説 字体辞典（普及版）』pp.472。 江守賢治 三省堂 1998年）

能 - ウィクショナリー日本語版

And I found a list of 異体字 of 熊, too.
u718a (熊) - GlyphWiki

The mystery still remains on the first character, though. (兼 doesn't seem to have that form.)
u517c (兼) - GlyphWiki