The kanji “金”, which means gold or money, was chosen as Japan’s word of the year, reflecting Japan’s medal win at the Paris Olympics and the damaging financial scandal within the ruling party.
The character, which can also be read as “kane,” was unveiled this week at Kyoto’s Kiyomizu-dera Temple, where Chief Priest Kiyonori Mori recreated it with a giant brush on a white Japanese paper canvas.
According to the Japan Kanji Proficiency Test Association, which has hosted the contest every year since 1995, the character that best captured the zeitgeist received 12,148 votes out of 221,971.
This is the fifth time that Kin has been selected due to his association with the achievements of Japanese athletes in the year the Olympics were held. The last time they won was in 2021, when Japan won a record 27 gold medals at the Tokyo Games, which were postponed due to the pandemic.
However, this year’s choice also reflects the public’s anger toward the Liberal Democratic Party. The Liberal Democratic Party suffered a crushing defeat in October’s House of Representatives election after it was discovered that dozens of members of the Diet had been siphoning profits from their official duties into slush funds.
“Both gold medals and political funds are attracting the public’s attention,” Mori said, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. The paper noted that some people may have voted for their relatives after a year of rising prices due to the cost of living crisis and recent unrest. A famous robbery case.
Mori predicted that “Wa” (meaning yen) would be chosen to reflect public solidarity with people living in Ishikawa Prefecture, an area hit by a deadly earthquake on New Year’s Day. He said he was surprised by his selection.
Considering the effects of earthquakes, the second most popular choice is “sai,” which means disaster, and third place is “sho,” which forms part of the name of Japanese Major League Baseball star Shohei Ohtani. or flight).
