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The OP starts out with this list of symbols that look like a table of kanas, except that some of those symbols are used more than once:

Symbols used in the OP that resemble kana/kanji characters

Many later scenes in the opening sequence can also be found to have a single, repeated symbol accompanying them:

OP thumbnails 1 OP thumbnails 2

Does the first image spell out an intelligible sentence in any language? And do the single, repeated symbols accompanying the later scenes signify anything?

Gao
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1 Answers1

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The characters look very similar to Jindai moji (Encyclopedia of Shinto link) (Japanese Wikipedia link).

Woshite base table (Image taken from Talk:Jindai moji page on Wikipedia)

These characters are theorized to have been Japan's character system before Chinese characters were introduced.

If I go through that table for the first image you show and match the characters (with help from the matching done by the article that @senshin posted), that gives me

ツ(tsu) ヰ(wi)  ヲ(wo)  ソ(so) マ(ma) ？     カ(ka) 〜      エ(e)
ノ(no)  ゴ(go)  ト(to)  ハ(ha) ア(a)  ク(ku) テ(te) ロ(ro)  コ(ko)
エ(r)   タ(ta)  ナ(na)  ソ(so) ル(ru) イ(i)  ア(a)  シ(shi) サ(sa)
サ(sa)  メ(me)  ゴ(go)  ハ(ha) ク(ku) ロ(ro) フ(fu) ツ(tsu) ヲ(wo)
リ(ri)  ヰ(wi)  ソ(so)  ？     〜     ミ(mi) ス(su) ウ(u)   ガ(gu)

My Japanese is not very strong, but I don't get any relevant results when looking any consecutive substrings of those characters up on Jisho (a Japanese-English online dictionary) or Google Translate.

I don't believe that the characters have any special meaning here.

Zasha Faith
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  • Most of the pages I found online were in Japanese, so someone who can read well in Japanese could probably take this further than I have. – Zasha Faith Aug 02 '17 at 14:43
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    Solid answer! [This Japanese blog post](http://mizuchin.hatenablog.jp/entry/20130113/1358098447) arrives at the same interpretation and also concludes that the text is meaningless. – senshin Aug 02 '17 at 16:34
  • Should I get rid of the romanji, or edit it to be furigana? Or is it fine the way it is? – Zasha Faith Aug 02 '17 at 16:57
  • Seems fine to me either way, given that one would need to know Japanese to try and make sense of it, no matter whether you write it in kana or romaji. – senshin Aug 02 '17 at 17:17