World (kaisho)

yo, se, sei

We use this to express the world, society, the public, one’s life, and a generation.

The determiners, this and that, are kono and ano in Japanese. This world is konoyo. I think it sounds obvious. It may be less easy to understand that anoyo means the world to come or the afterlife. Both kono and ano are written in hiragana.

If somebody says, sechi garai yononaka, it means this world is hard to live. Both se and yo in this phrase are this character. The sechi is worldly wisdom. The garai is severe or harsh. So, sechigarai is an adjective that means tough or selfish. The word yononaka means society.

The other day, I wrote about nisei. The sei of nisei is this character.

This is a five-stroke character. All the vertical lines begin from the top. They are almost parallel. All the horizontal strokes are also almost parallel.

1. Draw the long horizontal line from the left to the right.
2. Draw the vertical line in the middle.
3. Draw the vertical line on the right.
4. Draw the short horizontal stroke to connect the two vertical strokes you previously wrote.
5. Draw the large L-shape.