My first exposure to bamboo in Japan, as a newcomer from the United States in the early 1980s, was the jaw-dropping sight of tabi-clad construction workers deftly scampering about on bamboo scaffolding ten stories high. Although this versatile natural resource — utilized in Japan and China for thousands of years — has largely been nudged aside by man-made materials, bamboo continues to play a role in many aspects of Japanese life, including its written language.

When the Chinese began to create Sino-Japanese characters some four millennia ago, they utilized pictographs representing key elements of everyday life. The kanji for bamboo, 竹 (take), pictures two stalks topped with spiky leaves. As a kanji component in two dozen Japanese general-use characters, the vertical lines of 竹 are abbreviated so they can be written in the top position, where they are always found.

算 (san, calculate), for example, is topped with bamboo, indicating the material used to make what looks to be a rectangular abacus in the middle (note the two bead bars); some kanji scholars view the bottom component as two hands holding the abacus. 筒 (tō, cylinder, as in 水筒 suitō, water/cylinder, thermos) pictures a bamboo object with the same (同) diameter at all points.