便
Ulrike

This is my favorite kanji for now because of the funny story associated with it: My son took Japanese in high school shortly after I had discovered my passion for Japanese. He frequently showed me the 漢字 and 熟語 he was learning. One day he came home and said that they learned “unten” (運転: driving). We are both from Austria so our native language is German. “Unten” as a German word means “down there”. So I was curious. Is there maybe also an expression in Japanese that is pronounced “oben” that as a German word is the opposite of “unten”? (The German word “oben” means “up there.”) The dictionary we consulted did not show any entry for a Japanese word pronounced “oben”how disappointing! But then I remembered that the “o” of “oben” could be the honorific prefix. So if we found a word in Japanese that is pronounced “ben,” it could be “oben” in its honorific form. So we searched for “ben”—and what did we find?

便 (べん: convenience, facility, excreta, stools, evacuation) 

And then we looked at the kanji a little more closely (keeping the meaning in mind) and had the idea that it looked like a picture of a person from the front sitting on the toilet reading a newspaper. And then my son imagined how that came about: There was this guy in Japan from long ago who was sitting on the toilet reading his newspaper but he had forgotten to close the door. When he looked up from his newspaper he saw that a guy was standing there drawing a picture of him on the toilet and exclaimed: “Oh no! Someone drew a kanji of me!”