READ JAPANESE TODAY uses this time-saver—the principle that each kanji is composed of interchangeable parts and that if you remember the meaning of the parts it will help you remember the meaning of the whole. Each part was originally a picture drawn by the Chinese to represent an actual object or action, just as in western culture the Egyptians did the same to draw their hieroglyphics. To memorize the kanji all you need to do is look behind the pictographs and see what the Chinese used as models.
Looking behind the pictographs into antiquity to see what scenes the Chinese actually drew at first, and how these pictographs evolved over the centuries, is often very difficult. Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars have been successful in tracing the history of many kanji, but for other kanji there are still differences of opinion on what the original pictograph was, what its original meaning was, and how both pictograph and meaning evolved.
This book is not a history, and my objective is just to show you the easiest way to understand and memorize the kanji and their meanings. Where there are disputes between the scholars on the origin or evolution of a kanji, I have selected the version which best helped me remember the kanji. If you, the reader, can discover a better mnemonic, by all means use it.
How The Characters Were Constructed
The earliest writing in both the East and the West was done with pictographs. To write the ”word” for cow or mountain or eye, both the Chinese and those in early western cultures drew a picture of a cow, a mountain, or an eye. To the Chinese these pictures were
To write words which stood for ideas or actions or feelings—words that pictures of single objects or actions could not express—the Chinese combined several pictographs to depict a scene which acted out the meaning of the word. They combined, as we saw above, pictures of the sun 日 and a tree 木 in a scene to show the sun rising up behind the tree 東. They used this scene to stand for the word east —the direction you face when you see the sun rising up behind a tree.
In other examples, two pictographs of trees were put side by side 林 to stand for the word woods, and three pictographs of trees were put together 森 to stand for the word forest.
At the point where the Chinese ran out of concrete objects to draw, symbolism became essential. Without symbols, scenes representing complex thoughts would have grown to the size of panoramas. The kanji for these complex pictographs would then have too many elements and lines, generally called strokes, to be written in one square and still be readable.
Some Chinese characters have over 60 strokes, but the Chinese found out early on that kanji having more than 25 or 30 strokes were difficult to read and write. They continually abbreviated many of the kanji, reducing the number of strokes in some elements and eliminating other elements entirely. They are still abbreviating the kanji to this day. Some, but not all, of the Chinese abbreviations have been adopted by the Japanese.
Symbols are images that a society agrees represent something else. Any symbol can represent anything, as long as everyone agrees that this is so, like red and green traffic lights. The Chinese agreed on symbols for their written language. They decided, for example, that the symbol
To stand for the words power or authority, rather than devise a scene showing perhaps a general backed by his army, or a father disciplining his children, the Chinese simply used the symbol of a hand holding a stick
As a kanji by itself, the hand holding a stick was first drawn by the Chinese as
In the same way, pleasure was symbolized by a drum and cymbals
Another technique the Chinese used to form new kanji was to add what they called an “indicative” to an existing kanji to call attention to a part of the picture that highlights the meaning of the new character. For example, the pictograph for sword was drawn
Another example of an indicative is the addition of a line signifying “roots” to the bottom of the kanji for tree 木 to form the new kanji 本, meaning root or origin, as we saw above.
Placing the “indicative” in different sections of the pictograph will change the aspect that is emphasized, and thus the meaning of the new kanji. For example, adding an indicative to a tree 木 down around the roots, as noted above, gives the meaning root 本. Adding the same line as an indicative among the branches of the tree 未 emphasizes that the tree is still growing and producing new branches, and gives the new kanji the meaning of still growing or immature or not yet. Adding instead a slightly longer line closer to the top of the tree 末 emphasizes the top of the tree and makes a new kanji meaning tip or end or extremity.
To remember the meanings of the kanji as they are used in Japanese, there is no need to remember whether an element is a pictograph, a symbol, an indicative, or an ideograph, or indeed to trace the permutations of the original Chinese drawing of a specific kanji down to its form today. That is best left to the scholars, who themselves still find different theories about the origins. Rather, your objective is to memorize the meaning of the present-day kanji by using your own understanding of what the pictures in the ideograph meant to the Chinese who first drew it.
For example, the kanji 口, as described