Tsumugi “Shirogane” and Kaede “Akamatsu” May Have Coded Names...
[Long post & lots of cipher stuff. It’s a bit complicated but I tried to explain everything the best I could]
In my time investigating ciphers for my analysis of Rantaro’s lab, I came across this interesting cipher key that had been historically used by ninja:
So the reason this caught my interest is because the names Kaede “Akamatsu” and Tsumugi “Shirogane” fit this cipher key really well. And since I concluded in another post that Rantaro’s lab, a lab filled with ciphers, had more connections to Kaede and Tsumugi than anyone else, I figured this was worth looking into.
The top row of the cipher key represents colors: 紫 (purple) 黒 (black) 白 (white) 赤 (red) 黄 (yellow) 青(blue) 色 (color), and the side column are radicalized forms of the kanji 木 (tree) 火 (fire) 土 (earth) 金 (metal) 水 (water) 人 (person) 身 (body).
[A radical is a kanji component—multiple can be put together to create a new kanji. When a kanji character is radicalized, it’s made smaller and sometimes changes forms, so that it may be used as a component in another kanji].
As shown in this chart, the cipher works by combining a color kanji character and one of the radicals to create a new kanji character, and the created character is associated with its own hiragana character. Using this method, the ninja created a coded language.
For example, with this chart, the word ねこ (neko; meaning cat) would be written in code using these characters:
So now that we know how it works, let’s go back to Kaede Akamatsu and Tsumugi Shirogane...
赤松 (Akamatsu; lit. “red pine tree”) and 白銀 (Shirogane; lit. “white silver/metal”) are both names that could be derived from this chart. And along with the matching meaning, their names even have the proper radical/kanji components that would fit the chart:
And, of course, we can actually plug these components into the chart to get the hiragana character that correlates with it:
白銀 Shirogane; 白 white + 金 metal:
赤松 Akamatsu; 赤 red + 木 tree:
And it looks like the hiragana characters associated with their names are ふ (fu) for Tsumugi and ら (ra) for Kaede.
Now unfortunately, these characters don’t really mean anything. No matter how they’re arranged, they don’t form any Japanese word that would have any sort of significance.
But... There’s an interesting correlation between the two if we reference the kanji used in the iroha poem.
I mentioned it in my analysis of the vault doors in Rantaro’s lab, but basically, the いろは (iroha) poem is an ancient, famous poem that’s often used as a way to order hiragana characters; with one of its most common uses being within ciphers. It’s even used in the cipher we’re talking about in this post—the hiragana characters in the chart are following the exact order of the iroha poem.
The poem is most commonly written in hiragana, but originally, the poem itself was written entirely in kanji, with each kanji representing one hiragana sound, i.e. each hiragana character has an accompanying kanji character.
So for fun, I looked to see what the accompanying kanji character for Tsumugi Shirogane ふ and Kaede Akamatsu ら :
And the result is the kanji 不 for Tsumugi, and the kanji 良 for Kaede. I found this result to be prettyyy interesting because the meanings of these kanji are polar opposite; if they were words, they would be almost perfect antonyms.
不 (ふ) : bad, negative
良 (ら) : good, pleasing
So Tsumugi’s associated with “bad/negative” and Kaede’s associated with “good.”
So what can we make of all of this?
Well, feel free to make your own conclusions, but here is where my mind immediately went...
Kaede Akamatsu: the color red and good, pleasant, things—these associations could be represented by a red smiling face.
Tsumugi Shirogane: the color white and bad, negative things—these associations could be represented by a white crying face.
Kinda like...