Please help with kanji characters

[Hopper]

Judging by the artistic of the calligraphy alone, I will guess the charactars on this tsuba were copy from other texts that only your dad will know.

hopper

[EdB]

Hi, I will send this pic to my daughter in Japan who may be able to interpret them or her husband who is Japanese, if they can I will let you know.

Cheers

Ed.

[EdB]

Hi, I received a reply from my daughter, she says that the characters are Chinese, but the two on the left are ‘truth‘ and ‘sky.‘ However, she is not sure what that means in Chinese, so not much help to you apart from the fact that they are Chinese characters.

Cheers

Ed.

[AspiringPolymath]

Unless the calligrapher used "kanji" from the first few centuries AD (when they were first imported from China) these are most certainly Chinese characters. Further, the characters are "simplified" as opposed to the "traditional"/full characters which were used until the mid-twentieth century and continue to be used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the southern regions in mainland China.

While 6 of the 8 characters are easily read, there are two which are either modern kanji, a handwritten variation, or some other alteration as they are similar to common characters but I can't find them in any dictionaries. From top to bottom (left to right) the characters are translated as follows:
占: to occupy, seize, etc
（庘、庙、庾）？
纳: receive, take, etc
利: sharp, favorable, benefi-t/icial, etc
（区、巨）？
真: true, very, etc
空: empty, sky
王、手（？）either king or hand

So, as you can see there's a variety of possible meanings. Having looked at inscriptions and such before I'd wager it has something to do with bestowing luck and power to the holder. However, those two unknown characters (along with the last one which could be one of two different words) could radically change the meaning...

Old post but I figured I'd share my $0.02...

[Lemur]

Could it be someone translated his name or such into Kanji/Chinese, that can get really strange!

[AspiringPolymath]

You know, I was actually just thinking about that.... The second difficulty is knowing how you are supposed to read it. Traditional grammar dictates top to bottom right to left; however, with inscriptions and seals, rules are left by the wayside and the artist goes with what "feels right" or "looks good" or even what will just fit (which could mean right to left in rows going from top to bottom, or any number of other variations). It's tough to say for sure...

[JimmyHAD]

I was going to say it translates,"If found return to JimmyHAD", but I figured the OP would never go for that ......

[Tierdaen]

It's a touristy sort of translation, and while it is Chinese, pretty much all kanji are (漢字 means "Chinese character" after all...), and many Japanese variants are simplified with the same calligraphic principles behind Chinese simplified writing.

On the right side it's a transliterated Something Connelly...Perhaps John or Jim if the maker was Chinese (ignore my previous statement about the name John...Jim is actually more commonly rendered as 占, apparently). Knowing your father's name would reveal something, most likely. On the left, it looks like "E Real Karate" (真空手) or something based on it, which sounds either like the English name of some dojo, or else someone's personal motto. It could be a miswritten "巨" instead of an E, just as the second character on the right is probably a miswritten "康".

If he knows the style of karatedo he practiced or the name of the school, it might be possible to get a full story out of that tsuba. It doesn't surprise me much at all that even native Chinese and Japanese users would have difficulty figuring it out.