This week’s Kanji Disassembled is about the word ‘Kanji’ itself.
As everyone who has the exposure to the Japanese language should be aware of, Kanji is a writing system adopted from China. When or how, doesn’t really matter, unless you’re a historian (and I’m not one), but one fact remains intact, somehow during the inception of Japan as we know of today, these pictographs wound their way into its society and establishes themselves as one of the three scripts used in writing Japanese language.
Created as a compound of two kanjis, each kanji that made up this word, from left-to-right are meant “Chinese” and “letter” which are super easy to combine and imagine them to took a new overall meaning as “kanji.”
The first kanji of this compound when stood by himself are meant “Chinese” or everything Chinese in general. It is a fairly safe bet to made that if you see this kanji anywhere in a given sentence, the whole sentence would usually have something to do with China or Chinese. Disassembled, one symbol from this kanji is stood clear, and we’ve seen it on the first disassembled column. It is the leftmost symbol from this kanji and it says, “water” in case you’ve forgotten. Now, geographically, if one looks into a map, Japan and China was clearly separated by a strip of water, and China is at the relative left of Japan in regard of this strip of “water” that separated the two. Thus, the position of this “water” symbol which is at the relative left of this kanji.
What about the right symbol at the compound? Again, we’ve already seen the top three strokes on this symbol as “leaves” or the way I see it, a foliage which usually positioned at the top. However, for this symbol, I kept the meaning for “leaves” and combine this with the the rest of the symbol at the bottom as:
A camouflaged soldier. If it wasn’t immediately obvious, imagine these: The “leaves” at the top-most position acts as a camouflaged foliage found on this soldier’s helmet, the square thing is his head, the first horizontal stroke is his weapon of choice, the second horizontal stroke is his hand, and the two downward strokes are his feet. However, it should be noted that this interpretation is mine and mine only. The proper and right kanji for the word “soldier” is entirely different than this symbol.
Okay, now, we have a “water” and a “soldier” but what does it has to do with China or Chinese? First of all, it is fairly no secret that during the World War II, Japan has been allegedly stands as the substitute for fear and terror for the whole Asia, and especially for its surrounding countries. Therefore, I had stretched my imagination to see this kanji as “the first continent to conquer for Japanese soldier once they crossed the water on their left is China.” and it worked like a charm.
The second kanji of this compound is “letter” and it consists of the symbol for “roof” and “child.” To be quite honest, I couldn’t really put this kanji for a proper disassemble but it goes something like this, from the side, the kanji for “child” used in this kanji looks like someone bending over a horizontal stroke that could be well taken as a proverbial table. It looks like that this someone is sitting behind a desk, and bending over it, inside a roofed structure. Reminds you of “school” yet? In my case, it does and where else would you learn about, or with letters in abundance but school?
And friends, this is how I interpreted kanji for “Chinese letters” or more properly put, “Kanji.” Until next week.