Wow, rougue. You got the tattoo covered up because it's lame. Stop oppressing asian cultures. Why not give them a window for expression? jojo

Sorry, folks, entropy is dead on. It's called cultural appropriation, and it's the reason I had this tattoo covered up. Colonialism permeates everything and will continue to do so unless we identify it and fight it. Stop being so defensive. rogue

The whole reason i ask the language (months ago) was to see if it really meant revolution. mr puff

It's Chinese, not Japanese. Dani: the Japanese adopted calligraphy from the Chinese and named it Kanji. Sam

Kanji is the Japanese pronunciation of hanzi, the Chinese characters. I'm not as familiar with the Chinese usage, but this is the first character in the Japanese word 'kakumei', which means revolution. On its own though, it means leather. gk

Goddamn, I couldn't agree more. Just because it's exotic does not mean it's being exploited because of that. Fuck borders and languages, and fuck localized culture; what about the world culture? The culture of humanity? It's an artform and it's not limited to an area because that's where it's from. It's for all to use, if I want to write revolution in fucking portugese then I'm gonna fucking do it! revolução! Blah

f'christ's sake, this is why I hate activism sometimes. Colonialist? Really? It's pretty! Sure it's foreign and exotic, but it is seriously petty to associate art on a $.75 patch with colonialsim. Why do people insist on dragging their feet around, accusing all facets of culture of being reactionary? Get a life, people! Doodle

I think it's a little bit wack to just take something foreign and exotic and appropriate it as a radical style thing. Especially if you don't know what language it is. How does somebody know it means revolution? it's sort of colonialist to take another culture's iconography and use it to one's own ends. entropy

Kanji (which, i believe, is what that symbol is) is a style of calligraphy used by both the chinese and japanese people. One culture adopted it from the other (though I can't remember which one had it first) Dani

What laungage is this from? mr puff