If all signs in the prison camp were written right-to-left instead of vertically, they probably would have noted that before creating the sign. Especially considering their lives depended on it.
If you can't read the signs how would you know it's right-to-left? You are only seeing two unknown characters, you don't know which comes first. It's not about vertical vs horizontal. It's that someone who speaks English would assume that all of these signs they can't read are written left-to-right, and write the vertical characters they are copying in the wrong order.
This is such a facially bizarre thing to contest. They got a Japanese NCO to write the text, and presumably copied it as he wrote it. Why imagine that the NCO wrote it vertically and the soldiers horizontally? Likewise the article doesn't suggest that anyone thought the sign was written by a native speaker; why even imagine that's a requirement?
I mean, consider this in the abstract - the objections you're making here rest on the implicit assumption that you know more about the realities of life in a Japanese POW camp than TFA's author. (After all, if he fabricated the story about the sign he'd obviously fabricate it so as to be consistent with his experiences in the camp.) Do you really think that premise is more likely than the alternative - that TFA's extremely brief telling of the story simply doesn't include whatever details would answer your objections?
Most likely the circumstance they got the Japanese NCO to write the text in was a conversation about learning Japanese and how to write it too. Nobody is deliberately trying to stop them from learning to write, they are most likely in favour of it, the trickiness was just around avoiding the Japanese running the camp from noticing their interest in workshops specifically. If stroke order is important in this context then I expect the Japanese NCO showing them the characters would have told them and explained the proper order.
The only premise the story depends on is: that the camp guards saw the workshop and took it for granted that it was approved by somebody, since it was orderly and operating openly. If you accept that, it doesn't matter if the sign was amateurish or even upside-down - it would just look like something the workers had been told to make, or had made themselves to test the tools or to pass the time.
A bunch of posters here seem to be imagining that the sign was the lone keystone of the ruse, and that for some reason it needed to look like it was written by a native speaker or else the whole plan toppled. But nothing in TFA suggests that, it just says the sign was one of several things the POWs did to make the whole setup look like it had approval to be there.
Which one is it? There is no way to tell unless you already know the characters. Unless someone could read the existing signs they would almost certainly assume they were left-to-right and make any new sign like that if they only had the characters to copy.
I appreciate what you are pointing out here. I agree with you that getting it just right would be a challenge.
Did you happen to see the lathe? I ask you, which would be more difficult to get right in the smallest detail?
While most Allied soldiers would not be literate in Japanese, that doesn't mean they would all be completely ignorant, either. It just takes one to know enough to ask about character order.
While I agree that it was high risk, I'm willing to believe the people who were present when they say they pulled it off. Sometimes we dodge bullets without even knowing they were fired.
As someone who both a) does precision fab work as a hobby and b) made the somewhat unfortunate decision to memorize many thousands of kanji without caring about stroke order: it's harder. Sorry. 100% agree with the parent: even though I can read Japanese at a fairly advanced level, having not properly learned stroke order is a massive bitch. I can't handwrite for shit, and that's obvious to me and anyone else who can read Japanese of any degree of complexity. It is so many orders of difficulty above "ask[ing] about character order" that I can't even begin to verbalize what a category difference of difficulty it is. Handwriting Japanese that looks correct to a native reader assumes years of naturalization.
I already agreed that writing kanji without years of practice would be very hard to make look native. But they said they did it and it worked. Maybe it was obviously not native and it didn't matter. I don't know. But I'm not going to say they lied about making the sign.
Can we agree that it seems improbable that they fooled anybody about who drew the sign and also agree that they got to keep their workshop and their tools and have an amazing (and true) story?
