Character meaning "hot" is kanji of the year

People in Japan have chosen the kanji Chinese character meaning "hot" as the one that best symbolizes the year 2010.

An organization promoting the use of kanji characters announced its annual poll results on Friday.

The character for hot was chosen from about 280,000 entries, the most ever submitted since the poll began in 1995.

At the announcement event, the chief priest of Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto wrote the character on a large board with a calligraphy brush.

The organization says people who voted for the kanji had in mind the unusually hot summer that made many people ill and caused vegetable prices to soar.
The 33 Chilean miners who survived searing temperatures underground for more than 2 months also seem to have inspired voters.

Others cited Japan's unmanned space probe Hayabusa as the reason for their choice.

Hayabusa, which brought back to Earth the first-ever asteroid samples in June, burnt up in the 10,000-degrees Celsius heat of its re-entry. But a capsule containing the samples survived the trip.

The second most popular character this year is one meaning "center". It is the first character in the Japanese word for "China". The country drew much attention this year with the Shanghai Expo and bilateral friction with Japan.

The third-most popular character is the pictogram used for such words as "unstable" and "unaccounted".

The choice may reflect the tenuous political and economic environment, as well as revelations this year that the whereabouts of a large number of senior citizens is unknown.