Hi,
I watched The Wind Rises and The Boy and The Heron this week, and I saw the same kanji in both movies, but I can’t find it anywhere online !
I took a screenshot of one of the scene we saw it in. I guess it is emergency-related. It is like the 企 kanji, but without the stick radical on the left.
According to my wife (i.e. I contributed nothing to this other than hitting a dead end as you did and then asking her. It took her a few minutes to find it as she had no idea what it was when I showed it to her and at first thought it might be an old/obsolete kanji) it is not kanji, but yago (屋号).
This one is pronounced やまご
Wow, that is very interesting !
So that means that these yago have no meaning, they are like a logo of a company ?
Is there any way to type them on a computer ?
From what I have read, thus far, I think that most yago are comprised of actual existing kanji, but they are not a vocabulary word (like most names). But it seems that some can also be a unique symbol, so like a logo as you mentioned Or like 〒. A couple of examples my wife showed me were ones used on some old nihonshu brands.
As for the one you posted, not sure how one would type it. I can find no way via the IME on my computer, and when my wife was searching she was entering it via kanji recognition (drawing it).
I did an image search by literally assembling screenshots of the radicals and running the result through Google, and it got me one relevant result: it appears to be the logo of the 山上 kamaboko manufacturer.
Whether it was used for something else in the WWII timeframe of The Wind Rises and The Boy and the Heron, though, I have no idea.
