煙草 (tabako: cigarette) smoke + grass
Here’s what I wrote about this compound in my forthcoming book, Crazy for Kanji:
Nowadays we usually see tabako as タバコ or たばこ, but when the Japanese set this word to kanji music, they came up with 煙草, which breaks down as smoke (EN, kemuri) + grass (SŌ, kusa). Clearly, this is a match of meanings, not of sounds. Many refer to this type of ateji as jukujikun, 熟字訓 (matured + character + teachings). A classic example of jukujikun is 今日, kyō, “today.” The kanji break down as the present (or “this” or “now”) + day, yielding a perfectly suitable meaning. Neither 今 (KON, KIN, ima) nor 日 (NICHI, hi) has official yomi corresponding to the sound of kyō; that aspect has been ignored.
In response to this passage, my editor made this comment during the editing process:
When I was first in Japan back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I believe I frequently saw the word tabako in katakana. Over the next two–three decades, the katakana morphed into the frequently seen hiragana sign where cigarettes are sold: たばこ. My hunch is that there is a commercial motivation for this phenomenon; the cigarette industry wishes to help keep sales up by stressing what a normal part of “Japanese” daily life cigarettes are. I used to hear that the late Emperor Showa/Hirohito would give visitors gifts of cigarettes as a kind of “symbol of Japan.”
