Japanese rebus monogram

The monogram is composed of two parts: one a Japanese character, most often kanji, but also katakana or hiragana;[a] the other a simple symbol, such as a circle or square.

A name may be represented by a symbol that does not correspond to it but is homophonous – further punning – which is aided by the large degree of homophony in Japanese.

As katakana this would be written as ㋚; see Enclosed CJK Letters and Months for Unicode standard circled symbols.

Only a handful of symbols are commonly used, though some have different readings; these are:[2][3] There is no standard everyday Japanese term for rebus monograms.

As designs and corporate symbols, rebus monograms date at least to the mid-17th century, and early on were featured on noren.

Today the most often seen of these pictorial symbols is a picture of a sickle, a circle, and the letter nu (ぬ), read as kama-wa-nu (鎌輪ぬ, sickle circle nu), interpreted as kamawanu (構わぬ), the old-fashioned form of kamawanai (構わない, "don't worry, doesn't matter").