I came across this little tidbit tonight, and had to share it somewhere. It didn't seem to fit an existing topic, so I created this topic, for anything concerning Ranma 1/2 in the original Japanese source material.
In the arc about Ryu Kumon, the umisen-ken and yamasen-ken (thousand sea fist and thousand mountain fist) are given in the original Japanese as ??? (umisenken) and ??? (yamasenken). It turns out that if you drop the ken's and combine these two you get ???? (umisenyamasen) which means "sly old dog" or "old fox", according to wwwjdic. Which in turn might be taken as a description of Genma, the one who created these martial arts styles.
In any case, it made me wonder if Takahashi-sensei might have looked at the word umisenyamasen, and decided to split it apart to name the two fighting styles for the story arc.
Edit: Corrected the kanji for ISO-8859.
In the arc about Ryu Kumon, the umisen-ken and yamasen-ken (thousand sea fist and thousand mountain fist) are given in the original Japanese as ??? (umisenken) and ??? (yamasenken). It turns out that if you drop the ken's and combine these two you get ???? (umisenyamasen) which means "sly old dog" or "old fox", according to wwwjdic. Which in turn might be taken as a description of Genma, the one who created these martial arts styles.
In any case, it made me wonder if Takahashi-sensei might have looked at the word umisenyamasen, and decided to split it apart to name the two fighting styles for the story arc.
Edit: Corrected the kanji for ISO-8859.