亀 Turtle

１１画　龜部　【人名漢字】
【音読み】　キ
【訓読み】　かめ
【関連字】　龜／龝／甲



Reading & Writing



You can see how this character is modelled on the appearance of a turtle, even in its present day form. That makes it quite easy for me to remember, but if you have difficulty perhaps try looking at it as a combination of fish - 魚 - and field - 田 - finished off with a tail. Imagine a turtle as a bizarre kind of fish that instead of being cooked on a fire is happily living on a field wagging it's tail. Naturally, in order to retain the correct proportions the field is always bigger than the fishy turtle. There is also something about the shape that I can easily see as an elaborately decorated key, which in turn reminds me of the Chinese reading - キ. Look closely and you can even see the キ written on the turtle's shell.

Background
I was delighted to discover the previously used kanji - 龜 - is still indirectly accessible through IME. Interestingly the old form was also part of the character for Autumn - 龝 (crops + turtle), which has now become 秋 (crops + fire). Originally this character consisted of all three elements: crops, fire, and turtle. Apparently, turtles were heated over a fire causing them to contract in much the same way as crops contract under the sun or when burned.
I would have assumed that the firing of turtles was something that only happened in China rather than Japan, but looking at the dictionary entry for 亀卜（きぼく） I suspect that is not the case. 亀卜 is the fortune telling method of firing the shell of a turtle and forecasting a person's good or bad luck based on the way it cracks. That explains why the word for crack is 亀裂（きれつ） in Japanese. Incidentally, the character for shell is 甲（こう）, which you can clearly see within 亀.

Vocabulary
亀 is primarily used for people and place names, and is of little practical everyday use. There are just two words given a priority marking in EDICT:

• 亀　【かめ】 a turtle
• 亀裂　【きれつ】 a crack, a crevice, a fissure, a rift

The latter appears to be almost exclusively used in technical Japanese; even so there are a couple of interesting expressions listed:

• 地震のため路面に亀裂が生じた。(The road[s] were cracked due to the earthquake)
• 亀裂を深める。(Deepen the rift between/in [a political party/two people])　
• 亀裂を広げる (Widen...)

Finally, there are also a couple of well known idioms that you come across from time to time:

• 鶴は千年亀は万年 - "The crane lives for a thousand years, the turtle ten thousand" : A celebration of long life, though I'm not quite sure exactly in what situation I could use it.
• 亀の甲より年の功 - "The older the wiser"