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Message:: [QUOTE="JayBee, post: 440416, member: 9259"]Chinese, not Japanese. The characters are YANG (family name, which comes first) Shulin (杨舒林 / YANG Shulin is the painter's name). The last character is "xie" (写) and it means "wrote," so the inscription means, "YANG Shulin wrote/painted (this painting)".  Chinese scholars (painters, literati) often used the term "wrote" to mean "painted" and "hua" which mean to paint to mean "wrote" when doing calligraphy, as a form of expressing that painting and calligraphy share the way brush work was and still is used in traditional Chinese painting. To "draw or paint characters" and to "write a paint" are an art only attainable (with quality) by scholars and men of letters.The object in the center is a rock, not a bird.The Japanese imported the Chinese characters, and they are referred to as "kanji" (Japanese for "han zi / 汉字" or "Chinese characters") but this is a Chinese painting. The Japanese also use, side-by-side with kanji, the phonetic hiragana and katakana, which differ from Chinese characters. In my opinion, this is a Chinese painting, not Japanese. The name (YANG Shulin) is also Chinese.  Hope this helps. I'll do some digging, but the quality of the painting is not all that great.[/QUOTE]