Today (December 12) is 漢字の日 kanji no hi or Kanji Day, a day for appreciating the role of Chinese characters in modern Japanese society. It’s also the day the Japanese Kanji Proficiency Society announces the “kanji of the year,” the single character that best sums up the events of the past twelve months, which is done at a ceremony at the beautiful Kiyomizu-dera temple in Kyoto. The character for 2013 has been announced, and it’s….輪, meaning circle, hoop or ring, clearly a reference to Japan’s winning of the 2020 Olympics, which are called 五輪 gorin (“five rings”) in Japanese. The character is pronounced wa when used by itself or in certain words like 輪ゴム wa-gomu, a rubber band, and rin (reen) when forming more advanced words like 一輪車 ichi rin-sha, a unicycle, or 輪廻 rin-ne, the Buddhist concept of death and rebirth (samsara). Perhaps the most common use of 輪 (wa) is to describe your circle of friends (友達の輪 tomodachi no wa). Previous kanji of the year have included 命 inochi (life) in 2006, a year marked by a record number of suicides; 変 hen (change) in 2008, a year of change for Japan as well as the world; and 絆 kizuna (bond, as in the bonds that tie us to one another) after the terrible trials of the earthquakes and tsunamis of 2011.
The Kanji of the Year for 2013 is 輪。
