I’m indeed living near Tokyo. You can contact me by private email. My email is mathieu at this domain.

Your interest is creating a online handwriting recognition application(library) on maemo platform, so your interest and my one is very similar in `online handwriting recogition’.

I know some research papers, so if you don’t know, below may help:

An research using online handwriting recognition based on hidden markov models(in japanese)
www.jaist.ac.jp/library/thesis/is-master-2002/paper/sudotaka/paper.pdf

Online Handwritten Kanji String Recognition Based on Grammar Description of Character Structures(in japanese)
hil.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/publications/download.php?bib=Ota2008PRMU02.pdf

The research is being progressed at Sagayama Laboratory, University of Tokyo.
http://hil.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/index-j.html(in japanese)

By the way, I’m an office worker in Tokyo.
You are now living in near Tokyo(Yokohama?).
How about talking with face to face?

Thank you for your kind words. I really appreciate your support.

Thank you for your delightful comment. I wish I didn’t have to waste my time seeing and replying to this kind of comment. However, I think that the only person insulting here is you. Your message is extremist and rude.

First of all a name is just a name. It’s useful to refer to the project. And the plan is to eventually merge the results of this effort to Tomoe.

By the way, Tomoe itself is an acronym for Tegaki Online MOji recognition Engine. This is nothing less than three English words and two Japanese words. On top of that, “A tomoe or tomoye (archaic) (巴) is a Japanese abstract shape (i.e. a swirl) that resembles a comma or the usual form of magatama.” (Wikipedia) Hum, I hope you don’t feel too much insulted about that! At least the two Chinese people who contributed the Chinese dictionary of Tomoe didn’t!

Second of all, tegaki means “handwriting”, it doesn’t mean “Chinese character”. As you probably know, Chinese characters are referred to as “kanji” in Japanese and as “hanzi” in Chinese. This is why I didn’t pick “kanji” or “hanzi” for the name of the project.

Third of all, you claim that I’m implying that Chinese derives from Japanese but I explicitly wrote in my message that Japanese kanji come from Chinese!

Fourth of all, tegaki has a nice sounding. Even people who don’t know anything of Japanese can like it and remember it.

I feel insulted by your message because I love both Chinese and Japanese languages. I’m studying both and I spent quite some time in both countries. Absolutely nobody is in right to tell me that I’m willing to be insulting to any of those languages.

Even if you try to solve the problem you’ve gotten yourself into by claiming that you are building a recognizer for Japanese, that’s still wrong. The core problem you are dealing with is Chinese character recogntion, not Japanese. Deal with it as such, without a prissy Japanese project name.