Do Three Trees Make a Forest?

While some kanji characters can be very mysterious and there is no way to know what they mean just by looking at them, others might be very intuitive. After all, the first kanji most probably were created as pictorial images corresponding to natural phenomena, which evolved later on. One of them is the character for ‘tree’ – 木 (ki). Can you see the shape of a tree in it?

Then, most other characters are a combination of smaller units, so once you know some basics, you can try to decipher other words using your knowledge. An interesting example of such combinations are characters that multiply the same component. This type of kanji formation is called rigiji 理義字 when the unit is doubled by putting the two next to each other (if the parts are doubled horizontally it is a different category) and hinjiyō 品字様 when trippled.

Let’s take a look at the abovementioned tree. If you put two trees together – 林 (hayashi) – what you get is a ‘grove’. One more tree – 森 (mori) – and we have the character which means ‘forest’. So yes, three trees do make a forest! Some say that there is a character made of four trees that means ‘jungle’, but in the end (sadly) it is only a joke and no such kanji can be found in the official records. However, in some texts from the past you can apparently find characters made of five, six, or even eight trees! Still, even then it seems to have been no standard and these instances remain a little mysterious.

While the tree example is quite literal, other characters might be more of a reflection of a certain mindset rather than the physical world. The kanji for ‘woman’ 女 (onna) is an interesting case of this kind. When doubled it becomes 奻 (dan, nan) and means ‘quarrel’, ‘dispute’, but it is not used much anymore. However, the tripled version 姦 is still very much in use as the word 姦しい (kashimashii) – noisy. As you can see, the conceptual woman in Japanese writing has a rather negative image. And whether it really is noisy when three women gather… Is it that much different from an enthusiastic talk of three men?

Written by AL