The KYPC Champion of the Week award goes to Shirley, for being the only one to correctly identify anything this time around: F is indeed a mountain.  Unfortunately, the correct answer (which, just in case anyone wasn’t sure, was “lake”) was D, the only character not to be mentioned by anyone.

A. 川　B. 島　C. 原　D. 湖　E. 森　F. 山

A is a river, which means that when Shirley thought of waves she had the right idea but the wrong axis of orientation.  B is an island, which you can tell because it has F, the character for mountain, tucked away in the bottom there, and islands are kind of like mountains on the ocean floor.  And the rest of the character is a bird, so you can picture the image of an island surrounded by gulls.  And you can remember that the rest of the character means “bird” because, as we discussed in a previous entry, it looks like a dinosaur, and dinosaurs evolved into birds.  That may seem like a lot just to remember “island,” but sometimes the best kanji mnemonics are the most convoluted.

Anyway, C represents not the drainage pond in the cloverleaf loops but the field that used to be there before they decided to put in a freeway.  D is our lake, which offers little in the way of obvious explanation.  You may recognize the moon on the right, which could evoke the image of moonlight reflecting off a calm lake surface.  Or it may symbolize the vaguely crescent-shaped Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest freshwater lake.  E, sadly, is neither three water boatmen nor three acrobatic water skiers but three trees, and hence, a forest.  And F is the mountain, who, in typical mountain fashion, does very little to disguise his presence.

But enough of this small-time stuff.  It’s time to take on geography on a much grander scale.  Now we’re going to deal with countries.  In Japanese, the majority of foreign countries are referred to by names that use Japanese syllables to approximate their sounds: the U.S. is amerika, Mexico is mekishiko, and so on.  Today they are written with katakana, characters which have a sound but no meaning, but originally they used kanji.  These were ateji, kanji used for their sound rather than their meaning (Chinese, which has nothing but picture characters, uses a similar process to represent foreign names).  So, the meanings of the characters don’t have anything to do with the countries themselves . . . or do they?

While kanji are no longer used to write out countries’ full names, often times one of the old characters (typically the first one) has survived as a way of referring to the nation with which it was paired.  This is all just a long way of saying: find France.

A. 加　B. 独　C. 仏　D. 米　E. 蘭　F. 露