CJK Compatibility Ideograph FA68

難 is the Japanese name-use form of 難.

Japanese records associate this form with 人名用漢字, the category of kanji used in personal names. It carries the same ordinary senses as 難—difficulty, hardship, trouble, or blame—rather than a separate word. Its old form matters when a name or source text preserves that exact shape.

This history belongs to 難, not to the encoded variant: an ancestor of 難 appears in bronze inscriptions. One etymological account traces the older form to a bird name, a fire arrow used to catch birds, and ritual bird divination associated with 儺; it connects that story with later senses such as hardship and reproach. This is a proposed explanation, not a settled literal origin.

How do you preserve the exact glyph?

Keep 難 when the source requires this exact form.

Use it to reproduce a Japanese personal name or legacy text that specifies 難; otherwise, 難 is the unified counterpart with the same ordinary meaning.

Normalization can convert 難 to 難. If exact encoding matters, keep the original character through processing or use the complete Japanese variation sequence specified by the source, then check the result.

Why does 難 look different in different fonts?

The code point identifies a character, not one universal drawing.

A Japanese-localized font may show the expected Japanese form. If that font is missing, fallback can draw a regional form that looks wrong to a Japanese reader; the underlying text need not have changed.

If 難 appears as a box or an unexpected shape, check Japanese font coverage and language settings before treating it as a different character.