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I'm translating a comic and I found this kanji combination on the headers. It's like a counter for pages.

其之一
其之二
etc.

その is the reading. I wanted to get more info about that but I didn't find anything via google. Is that somehow familiar to you or is this way how it's written just really old?

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2 Answers 2

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其之 is a rare kanji version of その meaning "its". The kanji 其 on its own means "it" and 之 means "～'s". Today その is almost always written in kana, but they used difficult kanji for archaism. Is the comic about ninja or something?

その is usually used as an old counter-like prefix for chapters/episodes/parts of a story, not pages. For example その5 typically means "episode 5" or "part 5", not "page 5".

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    the comic is a doujin about dragon ball. thank u for the information I was not sure if the typical sono was the same as this kanji combination.
    – lovelykotori
    Jan 16, 2018 at 11:35
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    @lovelykotori That makes sense, Dragon Ball was loosely based on an old Chinese novel.
    – naruto
    Jan 16, 2018 at 13:23
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    I'm pretty sure Dragon Ball is based loosely on Journey to the West. More information can be found here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_West
    – Pleiades
    Jan 16, 2018 at 15:04
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    I think その works like the number sign (#). E.g. その１("#1"), その２("#2"), その３("#3") and so forth. Or like this: ルールその１、ルールその２、ルールその３...("Rule #1, Rule #2, Rule #3"...)
    – goldbrick
    Jan 16, 2018 at 15:05
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    此れ（これ）、其れ（それ）、何れ（どれ）、are still used occasionally in literary materials, restaurant and product names, etc. （also 此の and其の). The possessive particle 之 （の）can also be seen fairly often in surnames, given names, and some other instances.
    – BJCUAI
    Jan 16, 2018 at 19:57
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The normal meaning was explained clearly by previous people, as a Chinese learning Japanese I want to say some other things.

其: Chinese: it's(Third person possessive pronoun) Japanese: it(Third person personal pronoun)

X 之 Y: Chinese: Y of/in/etc X, X's Y ~= 的(Modern) Japanese: mainly X's Y, == の

We Chinese only use "其一"(Chi' i in Mandarin, Ki' iat in Cantonese) to explain the same meaning as Japanese "其之一"(その一, sono ichi)

Back to the topic, Japanese "其之一" means first of something, something might be a actual topic/person/thing or others. We Chinese & Japanese & Korean usually use Third person pronoun to represent the current topic.

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