Japanese Knitting Symbol Primer

Note: all left/rights are now correct.

I have had lots of mail about Japanese knitting symbols, and believe me, I wish there were a magic translation wand to wave over those-Oh-So-Beautiful-But-Incomprehensible pages in the Japanese knitting magazines. I am going to show you the most common symbols and instructions, but you, dear reader, are going to have to do a bit of study, too.

Unfortunately, Blogger creates blurry thumbnails of all my pretty pictures. I have to cut, paste, and annotate each one, which takes a lot of time (especially considering how feeble my Japanese is).

You can download a nice PDF copy of all these pictures here. You will have to join the Mountain Ash Yahoo group to download it.

For now, let's begin with the basics: Stitch, Knit, and Purl. As you can see from the image below, a Knit stitch is called a Front stitch in Japanese. And it should come as no surprise that a Purl stitch is called a Back stitch. Knit stitches are indicated in two ways: a vertical line in a box and an empty box.



The Purl stitch is a horizontal line, and this line carries over to other symbols as we shall see in a second. In general, if you see a horizontal line under a symbol, it means "Do Something Purlwise."

Let's proceed to decreases. Notice that the Purl 2 together--left slant symbol has a line under it.


And, of course, the right-slanting single decreases look similar.

Here are the triple decrease symbols--and they should be no surprise at this point. One more kanji for you here: Center or Middle. It's actually quite logical-looking and you will see it on patterns to indicate a central pivot stitch, as well.



And some miscellaneous stitch symbols:



Here is a small, annotated lace pattern. It's a composite, so don't bother knitting it. I am just showing you the kanji translation.



And finally, because my brain has now turned into a salted pretzel, I present a loose translation of the verbiage stuff that you will see at the beginning of a pattern.


Bear in mind that there are zillions more symbols--twist stitches, cables, fancy binding stitches. But this post covers all the stitches you will need to do Mondnacht, Mountain Ash, and most other Japanese lace patterns.

Do let me know if this information is clear and useful. If there are other symbols you want explained, let me know that also. Thanks!