How to Read Japanese Amigurumi Patterns

Though there are now a huge number of English-language amigurumi patterns available, many people would like to be able to work from original Japanese patterns – either online, or from Japanese craft books.

The good news is that unlike English crochet patterns, Japanese patterns are highly standardised – and almost always include a chart. Once you understand the basic chart symbols, you can read any Japanese amigurumi pattern with ease.

Some patterns come as charts only, many also include a set of row-by -row directions. Today, lets have a look at this cute and simple soot sprite pattern by ‘Takio’.

Reading the chart

In this pattern, you can see the chart as a block of symbols on top of a group of concentric rings. We begin reading the chart in the middle of the circles – the symbol you see there is ‘wa’ and usually indicates the start of a pattern, generally a magic ring. The first round begins with a zero or loop – O – this indicates a chain stitch. So to begin, we chain one stitch. Reading clockwise, we see six ‘x’s. X indicates a single crochet, so we single-crochet six into the magic ring. Finally, we see a heavy dot on top of the chain stitch – this marks a slipstitch, so we’ll join the round with a slipstitch.

The next row also begins with a chain stitch, and then we see an x inside a V. The V tells us to increase – if the x is inside the V, it tells us it is a single-crochet increase, and so we should make 2 single crochets into the same stitch. Some patterns use just the V by itself, but still indicating an sc increase.

We can now work rounds 1-4, reading anticlockwise round the chart (the same direction in which crochet is worked).

At row 5, the chart switches from rings to a flat representation. It is important to note that this is often done for reasons of space, and that although the chart is now flat, we should continue working in the round. Some patterns draw a curved arrow or arc at the bottom of the chart to emphasise this.

Rows 5-9 are composed entirely of x’s, so we single crochet plain for these rounds, joining rounds with a slipstitch-and-ch1 as indicated by the Os and heavy dots.

In round 10, we see an x inside an inverted V – as x in a V is a single-crochet increase, so x in an inverted V is a single-crochet decrease. Again, some charts show this as just the inverted V without an x, but it means the same thing.

Directions

Pattern direction boxes come in two forms, simple and detailed. The soot sprite directions are the simple form. There are two columns, the left-hand column showing the row number, the right-hand column showing the stitch count for that row, and in brackets the number of increases or decreases, if applicable. For example, if we see ’24 (+6)’, it means there are 24 stitches in that round, and during the round we should do 6 evenly-spaced increases.

The detailed form looks a little more complex – you can see an example here.

The left-hand column in this form gives a line of numbers, e.g. ’1-4-6′ followed by a kanji.

In this case, the numbers mean – how many stitches to increase/decrease by, where to increase/decrease, and how many rows to work this pattern.The kanji indicates whether this is an increase or decrease row.

So ’1-4-6′ means ‘increase by one stitch, four times per round, for six rounds’.

Rows which just give a stitch count are worked plain.

I hope this explanation has been helpful! Below, you’ll see some useful kanji which should help you read patterns which follow the more detailed form.

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