KYOTO--The Japanese public has given its verdict for the kanji character that best sums up events of 2019, and it is “rei,” the first character in the name of the new imperial era, Reiwa.

The Japanese language has three types of characters: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic symbols, each representing one syllable while Kanji is ideogram, each stand ...