If we start asking questions like “What is a character?” the conversation tends to become philosophical, but here I’ll avoid that and focus on characters within the “world of fonts.” In other words, these are characters handled by computers in a broad sense.

In the world of fonts, a character is something that is associated with a character code. That is, “あ” and “ぁ” are different characters, and “か” and “が” are different characters. On the other hand, whether the “Shinnyo” radical in the character “辻” has one dot or two dots, the Unicode code point is 8FBB in both cases, so they are the same character.

I believe that in most cases, if you just type “つじ (tsuji)” and use the kanji conversion function, the character “辻” with the two-dot “Shinnyo” radical will appear. I still haven’t broken the habit of using the Osaka font, which has been pre-installed on my Mac for as long as I can remember, so I’m writing this manuscript in Osaka now. Therefore, what I see on the screen in front of me is the character “辻” with the one-dot “Shinnyo” radical.

Next time, I may be taking a slight detour, but I’d like to talk about the question: “Why is the same character appearing with either one-dot or two-dot ‘Shinnyo’ radical depending on the font?”

（mm）