The Successor of The Game With The Longest Name Ever, or, in short, KanKen 250man, throws the following at me sometimes:

I completely failed at solving this, but J. Greely has a more extensive background (do you know why a 5-yen ball has 9 characters on it?), so he ovecomes this difficulty easily:

I cannot figure out one excercise in the Kanken 250man. It shows something (usually a kana), a counter, and two choices: "haneru" and "tomeru". Do you happen to know what it wants me to do?

The correct answer is "haneru". The question is: "does the fifth stroke of kita end in a stop or a hook?". Yes, this one took me a while to figure out. :-)

J.-sensei OTZ

UPDATE: Most computer fonts are useless for this kind of thing. Here's the "kita" on your computer:

Here's how it looks at my current rig at 56 points (Fedora Linux 9 Alpha with Firefox 3 Beta using vague system defaults):

And here's the picture in Kyoukasho font which J. Greely was so kind to send along:

Before I broke down and bought a Kyoukasho font in OpenType format, I found lots of links to a Ricoh Kaisho font online, hgrskp.ttf. It appears to have been widely distributed with their printer drivers, and passed around ever since.

Kaisho is the basic, stroke-accurate calligraphy style. Kyoukasho was designed for schoolbooks, and is the shape of a standard book Mincho with the stroke style of a Kaisho.