: Howdy,
: About the 6th glyph: I don't think the 2nd symbol is "8" in
: Japanese. The kanji character for "8" is the same as the
: hiragana (japanese phonetic alphabet symbol) for the sound "ha".
: However, if you look closely, you'll see the right hand stroke of the
: character has a bump on the upper right portion - precisely where the
: diacritical marks would be. The character "ha" can be changed
: into "ba" by adding two hash marks (similar to one double quote
: mark), or into "pa" by adding a tiny circle. My guess would be
: that it is either the phonetic sounds "ba" or "pa".
"Ba" is the Chinese word for "eight", though, and it's my understanding that Chinese and Japanese are closely related languages. So if it was "ba", wouldn't it likely mean eight?