My partner and I are replaying Okami and couldn't help but notice that a certain maze in the Oni Island dungeon had a familiar pattern of characters written on the floor.
In the process of confirming our suspicions, we found that no one else on the English-speaking internet has seemingly ever bothered to point out how interesting this room is, or at least not in a way that came up in my brief search.
Anyway, to those uninitiated with the Japanese language, there is a set of 48 characters (really 46, since two are obsolete in modern usage) called hiragana which can be used to write every syllable in the Japanese language. This makes it a syllabary, which is similar to but not quite the same as an "alphabet".
There is a famous poem (likely at least a thousand years old) referred to as the "Iroha" which uses every one of these characters exactly once, which is such a neat linguistic trick that it became the standard way of ordering the symbols for many centuries. Just like the English alphabet is arranged in the order of A, B, C, etc., so too was the Japanese syllabary remembered in the order い (i), ろ (ro), は (ha), and so on in the same order as the poem.
(This pattern shows up in Okami a few times, actually. The most basic enemies in the game are imps that wear masks with symbols--in a different but related syllabary, which we don't have time to explain--that also correspond to the "Iroha". The weakest imps wear "i", the next wear "ro", and so on.)
The characters are typically organized in a more systematic, "alphabetical" order now, but the i-ro-ha pattern is so ingrained in Japanese culture that it is still seen in everyday use in things like the musical scale (the equivalent of "do-re-mi") and children's card games.
Now, the room in Okami that I want to discuss in this post is a maze with each unit of floor marked with one of these symbols. There are three entrances to the maze, and they correspond to--you guessed it--the i, ro, and ha symbols. Once we recognized that, we couldn't stop ourselves from mapping out the rest:
(with the entrances at the bottom and the exit at the top, which I think is upside down in terms of North-South, BUT in my defense that's the way the symbols are oriented!)
And this map does in fact line up with the entire poem, when reading it in rows from left to right! The walls of the maze are unrelated to the pattern of characters, making them pretty useless as a navigation aid--though I suppose if you knew the whole thing by heart, it could give you a vague sense of how far you were into the maze and keep you from getting turned around.
Of extra interest is that it includes the old obsolete characters ゐ (wi) and ゑ (we), keeping the historical version of the poem intact, but also tacks on the relatively recent ん (n) at the end, which only became a standardized part of the writing system in 1900. This is obviously just because it is a video game and having the full syllabary included is very satisfying, but still fun to note!
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