At the Asian: Chinese or Japanese?

For a while now I've been volunteering a few afternoons a month at the Asian Art Museum, a great museum in downtown San Francisco with an absolutely stellar collection of artifacts from around Asia. I finally remembered to bring my camera in (on my last day, even) so I'll be putting up pics that I like over the next week or so.

To start off, I'm posting this picture of a banner that hangs over the main entry way. The information booth, in which I often sat, directing patrons to the bathrooms and escalators, is right under this banner, which gave me ample time to stare at it and wonder if those characters are indeed Chinese. They look like hiragana to me. Perhaps not modern hiragana, although there are a few in there, but more of the old hiragana, often called hentaigana.

I'm no scholar of classic Japanese. I'm barely even a scholar of modern Japanese. And the only Chinese characters I know are the kanji I've learned. But those characters look pretty Japanese to me.

I asked about it and someone at the museum promised to get back to me but never did. The scroll depicted in the banner isn't on display in the museum, nor is it on the Asian Art Museum's website. Any scholars out there who can shed some light on his for me?

Comments

[rupan777]

By the writing style and some of the characters, it does look like hentaigana. That style of writing would probably be seen as too frivolous to the Chinese.

[Adam]

That's exactly what I thought. It doesn't seem all that difficult to imagine someone in the art department making the mistake, as opposed to a docent or something.