Many are well familiar with the kanji 電 (den) — electricity. It appears in words such as:
🔹 電気 (denki, electricity, light),
🔹 電話 (denwa, telephone),
🔹 電車 (densha, train),
🔹 電子 (denshi, electronic), and many others.
A less obvious fact: this same 電 also means “lightning” ⚡️ (inazuma – we’ve talked about it before in my Telegram channel), though this meaning mostly survives in compound words:
🔹 電光 (denkō, flash of lightning),
🔹 雷電 (raiden, thunder and lightning),
🔹 球電 (kyūden, ball lightning).
But what elements make up the kanji 電?
The first part is simple and clear — it’s 雨 🌧️ (ame, rain). The second part is 申.
Modern dictionaries primarily list two meanings for 申:
1️⃣ mōsu, widely known as the verb used in humble self-introduction:
“My name is Maria” — マリアと申します (Maria to mōshimasu),
2️⃣ saru — monkey…
But what do monkeys have to do with it? Instantly, I picture monkeys dancing in the rain and lightning, holding electric wires in their hands 🐒💃😂
In fact, it’s important to note that this kanji is not just any monkey (for that, there’s the kanji 猿), but specifically the symbol of the Monkey year in the Eastern zodiac (cheers to everyone born in 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004 👋🏻🐵).
Before the kanji 申 became associated with these cute animals, it originally meant… lightning. Imagine lightning bolts ⚡️piercing rice fields (田) which developed into the way it is written now: 田 +⚡️=申.
Thus, the electricity kanji we started from (電) represents an electrical discharge piercing the space above rice fields during rainfall.
“But what about the monkeys?” you might ask. How did they suddenly burst into the domain of “lightning”? To answer that, let’s return to the Eastern zodiac.
🪐 In ancient China, calendar-making was based on Jupiter’s motion. They discovered it orbits the Sun in 12 years, leading to 12-year cycles, with each year assigned its own kanji name.
Later, apparently finding this hard to memorize, they linked the 12-year cycle to the legend of Buddha inviting animals to a celebration and making them participate in a race, after which the 12 who reached the finish line were honored with years in the calendar (the question of who came in which place is a whole separate story full of intrigue and rivalry!).
Consequently, the kanji that originally indicated the sequence of years became associated with animals according to their finishing positions in the race. Therefore, if you compare the kanji for each calendar year with those for the animals representing them, you’ll see that none match. By the way, I’ve also written about these kanji before.
❤️ Final thought:
What you thought was just an electricity character 電 is a tiny time capsule — holding:
🌧️ nature (rain + lightning),
🌾 daily life (rice fields),
🚂 modern tech (electricity)…
…while the monkey?
🐒 It just dropped by from the calendar — and never left.
That’s the beauty of the characters:
✨ They’re not just symbols. They’re living archives of history, astronomy, and myth❤️