Loek van Kooten, MA履 - the kanji with a shoe hidden inside it
Your CV in Japanese is 履歴書. It literally means "a record of the steps you have walked. " And that is not a coincidence, because 履 itself is built from walking. Stack four things on top of each other and you get 履: - 尸 a crouching person - 彳 a leg moving forward - 舟 a boat. . . which here is actually a shoe (an old, upward-curling shoe looked almost exactly like a little vessel) - 夊 a foot being set down Put together: someone walking, foot by foot, in their shoes.
In ancient China you sealed a gift of land by literally walking across it, pressing your ownership into the earth one footstep at a time. From that one image, 履 branched into everything it means today: - footwear: 草履 (zouri), straw sandals - to walk, to tread - to carry out, to live through: 履行 (rikou, to fulfil) and 履歴 (rireki), the trail your life leaves behind There is a famous story in the Shiji about this kanji.
The young Zhang Liang meets an old man on a bridge who deliberately drops his shoe and barks: pick it up and put it on me. Zhang Liang swallows his anger, kneels, and slips the 履 back onto the stranger's foot. The old man laughs, walks off, and later rewards that patience with a secret book of strategy. Zhang Liang goes on to become the mastermind behind the founding of the Han dynasty. The whole tale turns on a single shoe.
This is why we teach real components instead of invented memory tricks. A made-up mnemonic works once. Learn that 舟 can be a shoe, that 彳 and 夊 are feet in motion, and you start reading the logic inside dozens of kanji on your own. More at learn.japanology.nl #japanese #kanji #learnjapanese #日本語 #nihongo #japaneselanguage #kanjistudy #japanstudy