Every year since 1995, the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation (日本漢字能力検定協会) has selected a single Japanese kanji character to represent the past year. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the winner – and the runners-up – mostly reflect our year of the Pandemic.
And without any further ado, the winner is…
The Winner: 密 (Mitsu)
Mitsu (密) has a couple of meanings. But it won its place as the year’s top kanji due to its meaning of “denseness” or “closeness”.
As I explained in my write-up of the year’s trendiest words in Japan, The “3 Cs” promoted as a way to avoid contracting COVID-19 were translated into Japanese as the “3 mitsus”: Confined spaces, Crowded places, and Close contact. The character 密 itself trended after Tokyo Governor Koike Yuriko told reporters “mitsu desu” (密です; “too close”) at a press conference. The moment trended on Twitter; one motivated user even turned it into a video game.
The winning kanji was selected through a national vote that garnered 208,025 responses. Mitsu won with 28,401 votes. (Announcement poster here)
The kanji was announced in a ceremony at a location known across the world: Kiyomizudera, the famed Buddhist temple overlooking Kyoto. The temple’s Chief Abbot Mori Seihan did the honors by painting mitsu on a large canvas. (Video below – the painting begins around the 5:20 mark.)
Runner-Up Kanji
The top 10 kanji are pictured below:
Not surprisingly, the kanji in the running this year were all kind of…dark and depressing. The first runner-up was 禍 (ka; wazawai), “calamity” or “catastrophe”. (The phrase コロナ禍, korona-ka, has become popular in Japan as a shorthand for the pandemic. 病 (byou, yamai), “sickness”, was 3rd, with 新 (shin; atarashii), “new” coming in 4th as a way of expressing how COVID-19 has changed life permanently.
In 5th place was 変 (hen), “strange”. Very fitting. 6th was 家 (ka, ie), or “home”, for…obvious reasons. 7th and 8th were 滅 (metsu, horobiru), “destruction”, and 菌 (kin), “bacteria”.
9th place may be the only lighthearted entry: 鬼 (oni), or “demon”. As the Japanese box office and manga sales showed, this definitely was the year of Demon Slayer (鬼滅の刃; kimetsu no yaiba). And in 10th place, we had 疫 (eki), “infection”. Again, another on-the-nose pick!
The list of candidate kanji was so depressing that it led one JP Twitter user to brand them “Heian era trends” – a reference to the intrigue-fueled era in which Japan’s famous novel The Tale of Genji is set.
The Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation is the same group that administers the Kanji Kentei (漢字検定) or “KanKen”, a test measuring kanji aptitude. You can see the full list of winners from past years on the Foundation’s Web site. (If you want a little more exposure to the KanKen, you can see a video of me studying for it here.)
