Thank u John M

[JohnM]

Thanks guys for the positive feedback. It motivates me to do more.

I also love the variety of photos you were able to find for each logo."

The first picture of the beautiful vintage Tianyang set is from Elliot's Tenyo collection. Quite an amazing find. Thank you Elliot for letting me use it on the sister website.

One thing I was not able to determine that Elliot, Botond or one of you other detectives might be able to help me with is "What is Tianyang?" I could have sworn I read in one of my Tenyo catalogs or magazine articles on Tenyo something about the company being called the Tianyang Magic Institute, but after hours of searching I could not find anything. I know the Tianyang Magic Institute is mentioned on the Tenyo Blog, but I am pretty sure I read it in print. Even if I can find that is was called Tianyang Magic Institute, I am still not sure what the significance of the word Tianyang is.

The best information I got so far was from Shan:

tian yang is pronounced from 天洋 which is tenyo in chinese, so it would be the english pronunciation for the chinese name. magicians in hk or china would call it tian yang. it pronouced like that because of the word Tenyo, so they are very similar. but this is just my perspective, i will ask my bf for his opinion later as well:)

logo-billiards.jpg

You can see the Tianyang logo and the two characters Shan refers to above on the instructions for a set of vintage billiard balls.

I think Shan is correct that Tianyang is from the Chinese Language but why did Tenyo Shokyokusai use the Chinese word for Tenyo and why did he use the Western characters of "T", "Y" and "?" in the logo.

[Elliot W.]

Maybe those characters are used in both Chinese or Japanese? When I paste it into Google Translate in Chinese it translates to SkyOcean but when I change the setting to Japanese it translates the same letters to Tenyo.
Doesn't Japanese have different scripts? Maybe テンヨー is Tenyo in one script while 天洋 is Tenyo in another?

[JohnM]

When creating the logo page I did a little research and I think the Japanese characters are based on Chinese characters.

Another thing you can do in Google Translate is to click on the speaker to hear the pronunciation. When you have the two characters identified as Chinese and click on the speaker, it sounds something like Tenyo.

I think an understanding of The Chinese language and characters as well as the Japanese language and characters would be helpful.

An interesting note is that both Shan's boyfriend and Peter G's wife who are both Japanese were puzzled as well. It was Shan, who I believe is Chinese, who made a breakthrough.

I think a couple of guys here said they studied Japanese a bit. It may have been Botond and Brett.

A general question I have is do the Japanese and Chinese characters represent letters or words?

And one more note, Tianyang is a province in China, just threw that in there to totally confuse a already confusing discussion.

[Elliot W.]

I think in modern Japanse the characters represent syllables.
Here is a useful site.
http://stevemorse.org/japanese/kan2eng.html

Here is an article about Japanese writing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system

Apparently Kanji was taken from Chinese characters. So just to guess, I would say 天洋 is Kanji and テンヨー is in katakana. I believe Tian and Yang are the names of the two Chinese characters like Shan said.

I am not surprised Shan's boyfriend and Peter G's wife were puzzled. I showed someone I know who's wife is japanese a picture of that old magic set and she said she could not really read what it said on the boxes.
Seems to be they do not use that writing anymore.

By the way the set came with a pull attached to a Chinese 10 cash coin. Maybe there was more of a connection to China in those days. Or maybe it was just a bigger coin than any of the Japanese coins.

[kellebotond]

Sounds very interesting. I think probably we will never run out of Tenyo mysteries.

[Shan]

天is sky and 洋is ocean in Chinese:)

[Shan]

And I agree with Elliot!
It might be kanji also because Japanese do use Chinese characters(or vice versa)
So both Japanese and Chinese can understand kanji they mean the same

[Jaime C.]