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Sample Sentence with 紅一点

紅一点 (kōitten: lone woman (e.g., bright flower) in a group)
     red + one + point

佐藤は新内閣の紅一点だ。
Satō wa shinnaikaku no kōitten da.
Satō is the only female minister in the new cabinet.

Without knowing the meaning of 紅一点, I might think Satō-san was the lone red dot (or blot) on the new cabinet! This expression enables us to write about women with nary an (onna: woman) in sight! The word for “minister,” 大臣 (daijin: important + vassal), also doesn’t appear in the sentence.

Here’s the breakdown of words:

佐藤 (Satō: surname)     to assist + wisteria

The kanji (SA: to assist) is new to me. It combines the “person” radical personrad2.png with (SA, hidari: left), so we have a person on the left who offers assistance. Also new to me: the idea that originally had the connotation of “support,” as did (migi: right). But the type of support differed; involved verbal support (hence the , “mouth,” in ), whereas represented support to someone at work (). In the name 佐藤, one could construe “wisteria support” as a trellis or arbor! But a native speaker says, “My understanding is that comes from the 藤原 (Fujiwara) clan, which was very influential in northeastern Japan.”

新内閣 (shinnaikaku: cabinet)
     new + (government) cabinet (last 2 chars.)

The last two kanji, 内閣 (naikaku: cabinet), break down as inside + cabinet. As for the etymology of , Henshall says that (door, gate) has the extended meaning of “place sealed off for privacy.” And the component , which usually means “each,” has the sense here of “visit by a dignitary.” (I’ll never understand such leaps!) So all together, we have a “private place that dignitaries visit,” such as a cabinet.

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