下駄

Etymology
A surface analysis suggests a Japanese coinage of -derived components, as a compound of.

Historical usage suggests a shift from older term, itself deriving from +   from the even older practice of wearing flat pieces of wood on one's feet when working in the paddies to keep from sinking into the mud, similar in principle to snowshoes. This latter footwear persisted in use into the 20th century as.

The historical derivation indicates that the character's “footwear” sense, which is specific to Japanese and is not found in Chinese sources, could have arisen from phonetic  usage in the terms ashida and geta.

Noun

 * 1) geta: a kind of wooden clog with at least one, more commonly two, stilts or “teeth”
 * 2) the geta symbol,  (Unicode value 3013): a typographic mark indicating unavailability of a glyph, such as when a character cannot be displayed on a computer; so called for the similarity to a geta clog footprint
 * 3)  a stone placed not adjacent to the opponent's stone, but in such a way as to block the opponent's formation from escaping

Derived terms

 * : low geta clogs for sunny weather
 * : lacquered geta clogs
 * : the geta symbol, (Unicode value 3013)