Half as Interesting: Ghost Kanji

[Retsam19]

The Half as Interesting channel did a video on “ghost kanji” - 幽霊文字 - characters that exist in the Unicode standard but that aren’t real kanji. Fairly short, (can jump from 1:00~2:20 to skip past basic “what are Kanji” stuff that you probably already know) but interesting

Why Nobody Knows What 彁 Means

Looks like there’s been a thread on the topic before:

Ghost Kanji

I just read and thought I’d share a fascinating article about kanji that we don’t have to learn because they don’t exist in the real world. They only exist in the Japanese computer encoding system (JIS) because of … mistakes. In any case, it’s a fascinating short article. An interesting aside in the article is that there’s a reference work that lists all the administrative districts within Japan that’s seven volumes and roughly 9000 pages each, and buried within them are some pretty unusual k…