A Kanji Examined – 日

This post is authored by Jonathan. Please check out his blog, Jonathan’s Japan(ese) Journal • ジョナサンの日本(語)日記, for more Japanese related articles.

If you want to get good with kanji, you need to really jump into it and face it head-on. You need to grapple with it and, in the end, you need to tame it. Sure, it looks scary from a distance, but if you just take a close look at it and stare it down, you’ll find that, really, it ain’t all that bad. (If it helps, think of kanji like Pokémon that need to be caught in the wild and trained into submission. Or something like that.)

And with that in mind, I’d like to introduce you today to my sunny little friend, the character for Sun:

This kanji has four basic meanings:

It looks like you’ll get a lot of mileage out of this fairly simple character, right? We’ll go over the definitions as we go along. First, we’ll start with the “day” meaning and also look over the several readings for this character.

(Note that I won’t be using romaji, so I hope you’re up on your kana! If not, I suggest you review.)

“Day”

This kanji has two native Japanese readings: ひ and か.

日, when read as ひ, is actually a standalone word meaning “day.” The character is often read か as part of dates. Let’s look at an example sentence:

Quite a nice example sentence I found—it uses both Japanese readings in one sentence.

Near the end, you can see 日 as part of the phrase てつどうのひ, meaning “Railway Day,” apparently an actual day set aside for the appreciation of railways, which certainly are one of the lynchpins of Japanese society. In this phrase, 日, obviously, is the “day” part of things.

Now check out “10月14日.” This is how Japanese dates work: you write the number of the month followed by 月 (pronounced  ツ
here, but also read つき and meaning “Moon”), and then the date followed by 日. (The readings for dates can get a little complicated, as there are a lot of irregular ones. That’s a too bit complicated to go into here, however.) Thus, June 21 is 6月21日 and January 1 is 1月1日. Pretty convenient, that!

Perhaps the easiest place to see the か reading for 日 is in the seven days of the week, which, if you’re not familiar with, you might want to take the chance to commit to memory.

The characters in the front of each day mean, in order, Moon, fire, water, wood, gold, earth, and of course, Sun.

日 also has two Chinese readings: にち and じつ. Being Chinese readings, you’ll be more likely to see these in kanji compounds, called 熟語（じゅくご）in Japanese. Let’s examine a few of these.

So this essentially means “celebration day.” Makes sense, right? Here’s a good sentence for you to see it in action:

Definitely a situation none of us wants to find ourselves in! (Remember that because 祝日 is used as a time, you use に as your particle!)

Let’s look at another term:

Now here’s a double whammy for you, as 日 will appear twice in the same sentence with the same reading (more or less).

See how cleanly kanji fit together? And people say it’s frightening!

Note that 日 is using the にち reading in both words, but in 日記, the reading changes to にっ because it comes before a “k” sound. This, as you’ll see, often happens to つ before k, t, s, or p sounds. (Let me know if I’m missing any!) But this is still the にち reading—it’s just a bit abbreviated.

So moving on, let’s use both of these words in one sentence:

“Daytime”

In a slight extension from “day,” 日 is also used to mean “daytime.” So the character can mean both a 24-hour day and just the part of the day when the Sun is out. Trust me, though—this isn’t nearly as complicated as it might sound.

Here’s one with a normal ol’ にち reading again:

Boy, this にち reading is pretty popular, it seems! So this time, we’ve got a kanji for daytime—日—and a kanji for nighttime—夜—placed together. This combination, most appropriately, refers to both daytime and nightime. True, 日, in its “24-hour day” meaning, kind of means the same thing, but when you use 日夜, you’re somewhat emphasizing “both day and night.” For example:

Now there’s a sentence that I can relate with.

“Sun”

日 also can refer to the Sun. Indeed, that’s what its shape is supposed to resemble, though I’ll admit that 日 looks little like that familiar furnace in the sky. (It used to look a bit different, though!)

Let’s look at another kanji compound:

Another straightforward combination: sun + light! And there’s our にち reading becoming にっ again too!

Here’s another great word that you’ll probably never forget. See if you can guess what it means?

Can you guess how to say “lunar eclipse”? Here’s a hint: the kanji that you need to put next to 食 appeared earlier in this lesson. The answer will be at the end of this article.

“Japan”

Remember when I said that 日 can also refer to Japan itself? Well, we’ve all heard the expression “Land of the Rising Sun,” right? That phrase originates with this kanji combination, which is how you write the country’s name in kanji: