Kanji Pictographs: The Kanji That Began as Pictures, With Diagrams

The core idea: a picture squared off to fit a box

A pictograph, in Japanese shōkei moji (象形文字), literally 'characters that copy a shape', is a kanji that began as a drawing of the thing it names. The oldest surviving examples were carved on turtle shells and cattle bones in China more than three thousand years ago.

The changes since then follow a few habits. Curves became straight lines, because a brush makes straight strokes faster. Circles became rectangles, so the round sun turned into 日 and an open mouth into 口. Every character was fitted into the same square, so the eye, first drawn lying on its side, was stood upright. Each blue drawing below is a simplified sketch of what the kanji shows, not a historical form.

UnihongoKanji

東口ひがしぐちの改札かいさつで待っまっています。I'm waiting at the east exit ticket gates.

Twelve pictographs and what each one drew

The table adds water to the diagram's twelve. The first reading is the native Japanese word; the second is borrowed from Chinese and used mainly in compounds, a split explained in the separate post on on and kun readings.

Pictographs in words you will meet this week

Pictographs sit inside the most frequent words, often in combinations that make sense once read literally. Kazan (火山), volcano, is literally fire mountain. Deguchi (出口), exit, is literally exit mouth, and iriguchi (入口), entrance, is enter mouth: kuchi stands for any opening, which is why big stations have a higashiguchi, east mouth, and a nishiguchi, west mouth.

Otona (大人), adult, is literally big person, the word on every ticket machine. Even the week runs on pictographs: getsuyōbi is moon day, kayōbi fire day, suiyōbi water day, mokuyōbi tree day and nichiyōbi sun day. Here you are meeting a friend at a large station, then buying tickets for a sightseeing boat.

Beyond the basics: pictures that combine into new kanji

The next step was to put pictures together. Such kanji are called kaii moji (会意文字), literally 'meanings meeting' characters, and they work like a visual sum. One tree is ki; two make hayashi (林), a grove; three make mori (森), a forest. Sun beside moon gives akarui (明), bright. A person leaning on a tree gives yasumu (休), to rest, and a field above chikara (力), strength, gives otoko (男), man, traditionally the one who laboured in the fields.

Pictures change shape inside a bigger kanji, as the narrow left tree of hayashi shows; those squeezed shapes are the subject of the separate guide to kanji radicals. Treat the sums as memory aids: some historians read the left of akarui as a window, giving moonlight through a window. Either way, the idea is light. On a weekend hike, these kanji all turn up.

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森もりの中なかは涼しいすずしいですね。It's cool in the forest, isn't it?

Point-and-mark kanji: ue, shita, hon and sue

Above and below have no picture, so scribes drew a reference line and put a mark on one side of it. These are shiji moji (指事文字), literally 'pointing-at-things characters'. Ue (上), above, began as a short mark over a line, and shita (下), below, as a mark under one. The long horizontal is still the reference line; the pink strokes in the diagram's bottom row are the mark, grown into a vertical with a tick.

A mark low on the trunk of ki makes hon (本), whose first meaning was root or origin; an extra line at the top makes sue (末), the tip or end. The root meaning survives in Nihon (日本), Japan, literally sun origin, and in honmono, the real thing; the book meaning came later. In a department store and a bookshop you will hear these daily.

The honest caveat: most kanji are sound plus meaning

Pictographs are where kanji started, not what most kanji are. Traditional counts of the Shuowen Jiezi class only a few percent of its nine thousand or so characters as pictographs, and around eight in ten as phono-semantic compounds, keisei moji (形声文字), literally 'shape and sound characters'.

Hare (晴), clear weather, puts the sun on the left for meaning and ao (青), blue, on the right for its old reading sei; swap the sun for water and you get kiyoi (清い), clear or pure, also read sei. The gate kanji mon lends its sound to 問, a question, with a mouth for meaning, and to 聞, to hear, with an ear. So pictographs matter twice: as whole kanji and as parts of others. A weather forecast and a classroom show all three.

Traditional scholarship lists six categories, the rikusho (六書), literally 'six writings'; the other two concern how characters were borrowed in use.

How Japanese people describe kanji out loud

When Japanese speakers need to say which kanji they mean, they describe its pictures or name a common word that contains it: akarui no mei, the mei of akarui. At a clinic reception desk, a receptionist taking a surname by phone asks dō iu ji desu ka, literally 'what kind of character is it?', and the patient answers with exactly these building blocks. It is polite and completely ordinary.

Look-alike pictographs and how to tell them apart

A few pairs differ by one stroke or by which stroke sits on top; the picture behind each keeps them apart.

In sue, the tip, the long top line is the mark itself, which is why it wins.

Common mistakes with picture kanji

Treating every kanji as a picture. Textbooks start with pictographs, so learners invent scenes for 晴 or 問. When a kanji has two parts, first check whether one gives the sound: 青 in 晴 and 清 is read sei in both.

Drawing the picture instead of the kanji. Knowing that 口 was a mouth, beginners round the corners. Write square corners and keep the stroke counts: 口 has three strokes and 日 has four.

Reading 月 as moon everywhere. On the left of body words such as ude (腕), arm, and hara (腹), belly, the same shape is a squeezed form of niku (肉), flesh. On the left of a body-part kanji, read it as flesh.

Reading the four dots at the bottom of 馬 and 魚 as fire. In atsui (熱い), hot, they are indeed squeezed fire, but uma, horse, and sakana, fish, are pictographs whose dots come from legs and a tail.