Why Nobody Knows What 彁 Means

No, that character is just me.

The "Kan" in Kanji ultimately comes from the Han River in China, which is why it has a water radical.

My wife, a teacher of Chinese, took one look at those characters and proclaimed "they mean nothing". She was very confidageous about it.

As a Japanese, I’ve never seen those characters. Except when any file breaks in my computer because of unicode and JIS being incompatible

I'm so going to get a neck tattoo with those characters.

That 'Jisc' logo is wrong - it's for a United Kingdom not-for-profit organisation that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education and research and not the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee, FYI

I’m a font designer in Japan. Sometimes designers make mistakes when putting together a letter. These days they get caught when checking for mistakes and the vectors get edited, but in the old days before computer aided design it was much easier for things to slip through the cracks, then all of a sudden - a new kanji has accidentally been invented. Kanji are much easier to design in my opinion because once you make the radicals you can piece them together like a jigsaw, though modification is still needed.

the characters 漢 and 治 both feature the same radical 氵because they originated as names of two ancient rivers. So yes, they are water related, but over the ages they took on more significant meanings that surpassed their original definition

政治 more precisely means “Politics” rather than “government”, with 治 kind of meaning “management”/“solve”/“rule” etc, which is actually related to water too because in very ancient times the leaders are the ones who manage the river, which the community is built upon.

Take notes: this would be a really cool way to write out the name of some unknowable eldritch being

There's a song in Taiko no Tatsujin by LeaF called "彁 (Ka)". It's this insane glitch song with multiple time signatures, almost like a "ghost in the machine", like the ghost letter in its title. Also, the beat map goes completely crazy with beats overlapping each other constantly.

The theory I've always heard is that 彁 was copied from a blurry photocopy of 埼玉自彊会 "Saitama Cooperative Organization" from a 1923 newspaper. I guess thats speculation.

From the analysis of a Vietnamese Nôm scholar, the character 彁 looks like a combination of 弓 and 哥. 弓 mostly stand for a bow, or to strive for something. 哥 is usually used for adressing someone who is male which is older, or same age as you. However he suspects that 哥 is actually the duplication of 可, meaning worthy, or great ambition, or (able to) achive. Duplications is often used in traditional Chinese to exaggerate or emphasize the meaning of the character. So 彁 could means to strive for something unfathomably great, something that is of great meanings, or extreme worth. Do take this with a pinch of salt though.

As an asian, I can confirm that we painstakingly search for every kanji one by one in unicode when we text

Hanzi (Chinese Traditional and Simplified), Kanji (Japanese), and Hanja (Korean Han characters) all originate from 5th century Chinese characters. Many characters lost or changed meaning along the way.

Small correction: Kanji are ultimately Chinese characters, and it would be more accurate to say that the Kangxi Dictionary contains 40,000 Chinese Characters and not Kanji, as #1 only a small portion of those characters are used as kanji (and to be honest in normal Chinese communication) and #2 the pronounciation and definitions given in the dictionary are for Chinese and not Japanese.

The Jisc logo in your video is not the same JISC. The one you used is a UK based organisation that provides IT services to academic institutions.

There's actually a full 51 hiragana and katakana characters. 3 are no longer used in modern Japanese, but do appear in historical tests (and in some fonts); 𛀆/𛄠 (yi), 𛀁/𛄡 (ye), 𛄟/𛄢 (wu). Another 2 of the remaining 48 are almost never used except in specific circumstances and have alternative kana combinations to make the sound instead; ゐ/ヰ (wi), ゑ/ヱ (we). These are known as the gojuon, "the fifty sounds". The 51st kana is ん/ン (n) and was only created in the early 1900s to replace む/ム (mu) in words that make the "u" sound silent when spoken aloud. Edit: And then there's "small kana", but that's an easier situation; smaller versions of the "y" sounds, vowel sounds, and the "tsu" sound.

In our language, Urdu, there is one character that appears in the regular alphabet, is taught in primary school, etc but is only used in the spelling of a single word.

I think for 99% of population using Kanji, at least half of the ~50,000 Kanji characters are never learnt or seen in their lives. There were popular TV shows in China where teenagers compete each other to pronounce and explain random "fossil" characters. My theory is that people just keep inventing new characters back in the days when they couldn't find one to mean what they had in mind, because there wasn't a widely used dictionary to keep track of those. Then they end up like niche memes that no one understands in a few years.