0008 部

部

This character (pronounced BU in Japanese, bù in Chinese) is more typical of characters in general because there’s no easy connection between the elements and the meaning—part, department, category. The element on the right is a contraction of a character

邑

that means ‘village, town, territory,’ and which originally looked like this,

It represented an enclosure or area (the oval or square on top) and a kneeling person or a scepter; I found two different explanations. Maybe it’s a kneeling person holding a scepter.

The lower part of that character

巴

either portrayed a kneeling person or—much more interesting—the authority of the government, representing one half of a symmetrical two-part device cut out of wood or jade so that each side matched the other uniquely. One half was given to an office-holder and the emperor kept the other half. When appearing before the emperor, the officials held this as a sort of scepter. So, the ‘seat of a government’s authority’ is the area (the square on top) plus the kneeling person-with-scepter. In Japanese, this seems to have been watered down to simply mean ‘part,’ presumably because the office-holder only governed a part of the whole country, district, town, or whatever.

The stack on the left, which is just there to give a hint about the sound, means ‘to spit out,’ but only in Chinese and not in Japanese today. The upper left bit means ‘to stand’ on its own, while the lower left element means ‘mouth.’