Each year the organization that publishes the Standardized Kanji Test announces the “kanji of the year,” the single character that best sums up the events of the past twelve months. The kanji character is announced at a ceremony at the beautiful Kiyomizu Dera temple in Kyoto, one of Japan’s most famous places, and it’s fun to try to guess what it will be ahead of time. The character for 2008 has been announced, and it’s truly a kanji we can believe in: hen 変, meaning “change,” reflecting the many changes that Japan went through this year, including a new Prime Minister, plenty of economic turmoil and the election of a new American President with a similar message. The mechanics of individual kanji characters can be quite complex, and the hen character is used in many words, including normal verbs like kaeru 変える (to change [something]) or kawaru 変わる (to change [yourself]), and it’s also the word for “strange,” as in hen na gaijin 変な外人 (strange foreigner), something I’ve been called more than a few times. Anime fans may be familiar with some words that incorporate the hen kanji, too, like henshin 変身 (transform!), a staple of so many Japanese TV shows, taihen 大変(meaning “terrible” or “what a shame”), and that infamous “H” word hentai 変態, which has come to represent the more naughtier elements of anime, manga and computer games from Japan but which just means “not normal” or “perverted” in Japanese. Other characters that were considered this year included kin or “gold” to celebrate Japan’s Olympic medals, raku meaning “fall” due to the stock market drop, and shoku or “food” in reference to the food scandals from China.
