生きる笑う愛する (ikiru warau aisuru): live, laugh, love. Three verbs in their dictionary forms with no particle between them, as the English poster sets them: 生きる ikiru, to live, cited from about 1221; 笑う warau, to laugh, from 794; 愛する aisuru, to love, which the dictionary notes was adopted in mid-Meiji as the translation of English love and came, through that joining, to mean affection between equals. The order is the slogan's, traced to Bessie Anderson Stanley's 1904 poem Success; no Japanese book prints the three together before 1946, and the line is the house's Japanese for the English, her English in a master's brush. The three-character form on this page, 生笑愛, is the same three verbs reduced to their kanji.
This artwork makes a truly lovely gift and is a visual reminder of the importance of living well.
生笑愛 (sei shō ai) is the three-character form of 生きる笑う愛する, live, laugh, love, explained above: the three verbs reduced to their kanji, as Japanese does for space or for art.
Each design is Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase's hand-brushed calligraphy of the word or phrase on this page, delivered as a PDF you can print. Every PDF includes the line art, so a tattoo artist or a craftsperson can work from the outline as well as the brushed image.
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