Its funny how a single japanese symbol would be harder to crack than the anglicized name for it

Do we know if the asterisks count Unicode code points rather than bytes?

Doesn't really matter, the IME shows the input until you confirm which kanji you want.

	▲	LoganDark 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When the IME inserts the character, it'll be made up of multiple bytes because of the nature of UTF-8, so it may appear as multiple asterisks regardless.