I came across something interesting I wanted to share.
It was clear to me that they were using that kanji as a tally marker because it had five strokes but I ended up looking it up online anyway because I was curious. The kanji he is using is the kanji 正 which means correct, proper or honest. It takes 5 strokes to complete it making it a useful tally mark.
The tally mark we are most familiar with in the US is the five bar gate:
Which is also used in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, other North American countries and Zimbabwe.
Not only Japan but also Korea, Taiwan and China use the kanji tally mark.
The tally marks used in spanish speaking countries such as Spain and in South American us a box like tally:
Just one of those things you never really think about much but I thought it would be interesting to share what I learned! Hope this was interesting to some other people as well!
In a beauty companies ad in the same magazine I found the word "kirei" written in katakana. Which is a similar situation to above in that "kirei" is a word of Japanese origin meaning beautiful or pretty. Also interesting was right after it they used the word kawaii (meaning cute) but chose to wrote that in hiragana. In this case though it appears to me that they wrote the word in katakana as an attention getter. I say this for two reasons. One is that the magazine reads right to left from the front but each page itself actually reads left to right. Therefore キレイis actually the first word you see on the page. Which brings me to my second reason is that this page is an ad. Success of an ad depends on people reading it and being interested in there product. They don't have a chance unless they find some way to catch your attention. Leading to a possible explanation for why they chose to write "kirei" in katakana and not in hiragana like they did with "kawaii".
