Why is it called 'Ugendou', anyway?
雨乾堂
Ugendou
Okay, so sometimes random things come to me when I'm sitting on trains travelling in between one busy city and another...erm...not so busy non-city. I came back from my trip today and (after having read the spoilers, am loving Hacchi all the way for the record...) I started wondering a bit more about this.
Every Bleach fan is familiar with Ugendou, right? Ukitake's little chamber where he sleeps, coughs, and apparently does administrative business, overlooking the koi lakes somewhere on the perimeter of Thirteenth Division.
But how did it get its name?
The kanji for Ugendou means as follows:
雨 = 'ame' 'U' - rain
乾 = 'kawa(ku)' kawa(kasu) inui, KAN, KEN - dry, drought, heaven, emperor.
堂 = 'DOU' = hall, chamber.
This from my kanji dictionary. The words written in lower case are 'kunyomi' words and the ones in capitals are 'onyomi' words. Rather than get into a long and laborious explanation of what those are, I'm just going to say that most compound words in Japanese (most, not all) use onyomi readings. Ugendou is one of these, as you can see. U - GEN - DOU. (K can become G when it figures second or later in a word).
Obviously it might just mean that it's a shelter from the rain, but that sounds a bit like a busstop to me. Also, I'm only really familiar with 'kan' as 'dry' and didn't realise it had other connitations - which led me to wonder whether Shun named it as a sick joke as the "Rain Emperor's Hall'". But we don't know that Ukitake's power has anything to do with rain - it may but it may just as easily not. And there are more common terms for king or emperor that seem to fit that idea better (unless Kubo was going for a play on words). So...what do we get to then? Just a pretty name? Rain Heaven Chamber?
I saw someone suggest Hall of Dried Rain somewhere - but I find that a bit hard to get my head around since...you can't dry rain. It's not fruit. It kinda...isn't there any more when it's dried. So I'm not sure about that.
But maybe we could have Hall of Heavenly Rain...? Rain Drought Chamber?
I dunno. What do you think people? Opinions please!