"Andy Dingley" wrote in message
...
I may be wrong, but it doesn't appear that there is any play on words
going
on here.

All Japanese etymology is a play on words. Every character has a
shedload of meanings. Every word is only a couple of characters.
There's huge duplication and potential ambiguity here.

Yes, but the character for Kami (paper) is completely different from either
of the characters in the word gami.
Really all they share is that they sound alike.
Jim Breen has an excellent site which deals with Japanese translations and
characters.
http://www.aa.tufs.ac.jp/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?9C

The creation of a "beautiful" word (which is the wrong term, but there
is an aesthetic notion here) is in picking something that has several
meanings, made by reading the same characters in different ways and
having many or all of the meanings relevant to the concept expressed
by the overall word.

I'd agree, but none of that is going on here.
Both of these gami's are as alike as toy is to toilet or toyota.
Ok, I take that back. They are the gami's are even less alike...

-Jack