Family Crest in Japanese Samurai

As a suitable example of lens A, people in Japan, the East, present themselves using almost original letters, this page would introduce "family crests" used by Japanese samurai, called "Kamonー家紋ー” in Japanese. Kamon is a type of emblems that both Samurai and commoners have used to represent family genealogy. Especially, those samurai used are called "Busho-monー武将紋ー”

I chose several famous family crests as examples. As you can see, the symbols usually imitate flours or weeds. Also, there is no symbols using Kanji. Before I explain the connection between Family Crest or emblems and Kanji characters, the reason why flours and weeds are mainly used would be described.

According to the Toyo Keizai Online (http://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/63869), Samurai were likely to use weeds in the fields rather than lions, eagles, or animals that are categorized in the highest on the food-chain. Compared to royals in Britain or France, they usually used rose or lily, beautiful and colorful flowers, we receive the impression that Japanese feudal warlord use such a unfancy symbols.

It is because those weeds have strong vitality and patient so that those emblems could depict that samurai with the power of rebellion. So why did they not use Kanji as Kamon? I interpret this fact that because the emblems were used for "family" and not for "individual". In other words, they did not use these Kamon to express themselves, but represent. 

Like Kamon, samurai also used symbols on their armors too. The place that Samurai put those symbolic ornaments called Tatemono is like helmet called Kabuto. There are couple samurai who put Kanji on Kabuto as their symbols.

Since these ornaments are to represent myself, it could be said that the use is close to cute handwritings, Maru-moji. However, these Kanji ornaments usually imitated from Buddhism ideas or passage from sutras. Therefore, these ornaments illustrate not only their feelings and thoughts but also religious ideas too. I assume the reason is that they wanted to fight with grace of God, whose  way of thinking is close to arabesque or Arabic calligraphy too.