読, Kanji of the Week

Japanese 読 differs from its traditional Chinese counterpart (讀) in having 壳 on the right-hand side.  Graphically speaking, the Chinese symbol for "reading" is "language" combined with "sell" (言+賣=讀, cf. 读), whereas Japanese has ended up with the same meaning ("reading") instead being symbolically associated with the "husk" (壳/殻) of language.  I presume, however, that the 壳 was borrowed from 殻 at a time when the symbol still suggested a bell, drum, or some other musical instrument: 殻 shows a hand with a tool striking something presumed to make a sound, although the modern meaning is "husk" (or outer shell, etc.).

蔵, Kanji of the Week

In Japanese, 蔵 means a "storehouse" of some kind (possibly a cellar, granary, treasury, etc., and possibly used in an abstract sense).  The strange thing is that, underneath the plant radical at the top, the basic framework of the character comes from a word meaning "to kill" (and still used in Chinese as such, if rarely: 戕害, qiāng hài).  Added to this is the familiar glyph for an overseer (or government official of some kind).  Incongruously, the combination of these two results in a character meaning "happy", or, sometimes, "skillful".  Although this is presumed to be arbitrary (or "merely phonetic"), the ominous tone of the etymology here is not entirely unique: the correct origin of 幸 (in shiawase, "happiness" & xìng, "good fortune") is similarly macabre.

協, Kanji of the Week

If you're interested in politics, you see the symbol 協 quite a lot, in both Japanese and Chinese.

In Japanese, 協 is a rare example of a character in common use that has just one sound (consistently): kyō (きょう).

露, Kanji of the Week

When typing in pictographs (in languages like Japanese and Chinese) I sometimes put the character into Google image-search to confirm that I've got the right one (i.e., that I haven't ended up with a similar-looking glyph that's slightly wrong).

With characters like 露, the results can be surprising.

The primary meaning of 露 in both Chinese and Japanese is "dew" (つゆ), but in Chinese it somehow ended up with a sense of revealing something that should not be revealed (my dictionary provides the unusually comical example of, 你褲子破的都露屁股了).  In Japanese, this has become yet another word for "nude" with the phonetically-unrelated あらわ as its Kun-Yomi (cf. the Japanese use of 露骨, ろこつ, "blatant/blunt", but sometimes meaning "lewd").

So, if you're expecting images of dew (つゆ) you'll be strangely disappointed in putting 露 into Google.