Sinister* Runker
* L. sinister, left-hand
thiruki@ipns.com |
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(hidari-kiki: "left advantage", Japanese for left-handed).
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International Left Hander Day |
I grew up in more liberal times, in Canada, where handedness is not an issue. My kindergarten and elementary school provided left-handed scissors for art projects. There were always a few left-handed desks in junior and senior high school, and some left-handed fold-out tabletops in university lecture halls. I was able to fully bloom into a southpaw!
Being a lefty is more of a hindrance in Japan than North America, I suspect. Ohashi (chopsticks) work equally well in either hand, but kanji (Chinese characters used in written Japanese) have a strict stroke order and direction meant for right-handers, and I can never get mine to look quite the way they should.
On my trips to Japan, people tend to express surprise when I use my left hand to write or eat. But attitudes toward left-handedness are finally starting to change there, and the number of people who are openly left-handed is increasing.
Old exponents of penmanship had a dim view of lefties. As one 1913 magazine article said, being a southpaw was associated with "criminals, insane persons, imbeciles, epileptics, vagrants and social failures of various sorts."
More recently, lefties have memories of being whacked with rulers, fitted with mirrors to change eye dominance or being diagnosed as dyslexic.
Young southpaws still face real problems in school: they must push their writing tools, they can't see what they've just written, they may be slower to finish tests than righties, the wire spirals in notebooks hurt their delicate hands and they pick up smudges from soft pencils and runny pens.
Some lefties sometimes find it easier to write backward. Leonardo da Vinci wrote this way because it was easier for him as a left-hander, not because he had anything to hide.
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