The less-than-three kanji

[pne]

As you may or may not know, JIS codes for kanji use only seven bits; in ISO-2022-JP, kanji are distinguished from ASCII characters by escape sequences introducing and ending sequences of JIS characters. So (nearly) all sequences of two ASCII characters can also be interpreted as JIS characters.

Even the famous sequence "<3" :) It corresponds to 竺.

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

"bamboo", apparently, as marikochan said (http://www.livejournal.com/users/pne/278765.html?thread=801005#t801005).

(Good point in asking, though; not all characters have a meaning by themselves and are nearly always used together with other characters. But most do.)