Is Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida Chinese? No, that's not true: The evidence in the video uses Kanji characters (characters of Chinese origin) inaccurately.
The claim appeared on a TikTok video (archived here) on June 2, 2023. The text over the video can be translated from the Japanese language as follows:
Prime Minister Kishida is not Japanese. The name "Kishida" is created by combining the character for "tree" and "child," and if you vertically put them together, what do you think the characters say? Kishida not being from Japan explains all the things he's been doing.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jun 14 01:45:33 2023 UTC)
Linguistically, the Kanji characters for Kishida's last name consist of 岸 and 田, which mean "shore" and "field," respectively. The character 岸 can phonetically be read as "kishi," and the claim originates from the fact that ki is the phonetic pronunciation of 木 (tree) and shi is the phonetic pronunciation of 子 (child). When one puts the character 木 on top of 子, the character transforms into 李 (Lee), which is a common Chinese surname.
However, Chinese characters do not work this way. Each character has its own meaning, and the origin of the character 岸 has nothing to do with the character 李. Most Japanese kanji characters also retain the same phonetics and semantics as their Chinese counterpart, and so the character 岸 stands alone even in the Chinese lexicon, which is supported by the dictionary entry for 岸 in a Chinese-English dictionary below:
(Source: Purple Culture)
Furthermore, PM Kishida's family tree has no non-Japanese names in all branches, reinforcing the idea that he is ethnically Japanese.
