It's incredibly easy to waste time on the web. I had a quick dip in to my (void) mailbox, and ended up following a link to a (sometimes) very funny thing on the Guardian website (Kill a rat).
That article told me that 2004 is the UN Year of Rice. For some reason I clicked on the “rice is life” logo and was looking at the Japanese and Chinese versions trying to work out what the Han/Kanji symbol for ‘rice’ is. I couldn't guess, but the Unicode character database tells me that it's U+2F76, which, if your browser can cope with these newfangled character sets, and my blog software hasn't screwed it up again, looks like this: ⽶ It kind of makes sense, with the cross maybe being the stalks and the little dashes being the ricey bits. The version in the Japanese logo though is just a kind of bent cross, without the dashes, which doesn't look nearly as ricelike.
Another one that's easy to read is U+2F7B, ‘feather’: ⽻ Looks like one, or possibly two feathers to me.
It all ended in tears when I tried to display character U+2F31, which is ‘turban’. Unlike rice, the turban kills my browser and makes X segfault. I managed to get it off the Unicode code chart PDF, so here it is, turban:
Hmm, Unicode calls these three characters ‘Kangxi radicals’, whatever that means. Nevermind, time for bed.