2) Some of the oldest samples of writing in Japan are on bronze artifacts, such as swords and mirrors. In some cases, the Japanese texts are not grammatical (or characters are reversed), which suggests that Chinese characters had value other than what they said; they had cultural capital as a-legible symbols. Here, you have one Chinese mirror, and two Japanese mirrors. Thinking about materials (bronze), costs, literacy, and so forth, what impressions do these three mirrors make on you? Can you think of comparable phenomena where the "image" of text is more important than what it says?