This week’s kanji is another of my favorite kanji. Along with kanji for “love”, these two might well be the first two kanjis I learned to memorize and write with perfection in each and every stroke. It’s the kanji for “war”, “fight”, or any other words that brought forth image of men trading blows with sole purpose to hurt and probably kill each other.

The right part symbol of this kanji has already made an appearance in this column. It was the symbol for an “arrow” with a colored “tie” attached to it. But of course, as we’re talking about the ingenuity of human when they created the instruments of war, we’re going to stick with “arrow” meaning for this symbol.

Associating an “arrow” with “war” is trivial especially when you’re considering that it is easy to imagine that kanji system was created during a period when arrows still held dominance in most wars taking place on that period.

Now for the left part symbol of this kanji, I would like to divide this symbol into a couple of logical groupings. The first grouping is three strokes at the top and the symbol for “rice paddy” or “brain” at the center. Here’s what I had in mind when taking this group altogether.

It is fairly easy to imagine the top three strokes at the top as a proverbial symbol of light emanates from a flickering light bulb. Added to the “brain” symbol right underneath, gives an impression of “aha.. I’ve got some ideas” just like an image shown above.

The second logical grouping is the horizontal-vertical stroke right underneath the strokes that symbolized “brain.” Any novice kanji learner should be immediately reminded to the symbol for number “ten.” In this context, I scraped the meaning of “ten” and then transforms it into “many.” Hence, combining these logical grouping together, I’ve got “many” and “aha.. I’ve got some ideas.”

Finally, taking all these reasoning together, I’ve got this story to help me remember this kanji. “War, wether fought with stones, arrows or flying rockets, they are usually driven by some dude with a sick ideas, strategizing, crafting, and most of the time, moving many, many of its resources into a situation where some, half, perhaps even most of it taken as a collateral. After all, it takes one Sun Tzu to wrote ‘Art of War’”

Confusing perhaps, but that is how I see this kanji and after all, writing this kanji, stroke by stroke is a meditation on its own.