What 笹 means
Bamboo grass. In Japanese, sasa names low, thicket-forming bamboo, not tall bamboo stalks.
The word appears in the Kojiki (712) as 小竹; the glyph's exact first appearance is not established as of 2026. This Japanese-made character pairs 竹, bamboo, with a leaf element to write that native plant word.
As of 2026, documented uses include 笹巻き, leaf-wrapped celebratory rice, and 笹飾り, branches hung with Tanabata wishes. In compounds sasa can mean the plant, the leaf, the food, or the decoration.
Neutral as a kanji; tone comes from the word or compound.
A lone 笹 reads as sasa, not as generic bamboo.
Who writes 笹
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Related characters
3
小竹 Two-character spelling meaning small bamboo, used for sasa in the Kojiki (712).
Questions people ask
1Why does 笹 show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
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How to type or find 笹
- Also called
- bamboo grass · dwarf bamboo · 篠
- Search it as
- bamboo · tanabata · chimaki · kumazasa · sasabune
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
笹\7B39Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.