官僚
かんりょう · kanryou · JLPT N3 · noun
bureaucrat
🏛️📋 官僚 = official + colleague: a whole office full of officials
官 (kan) means government official and 僚 (ryou) means colleague or fellow worker, as in 同僚 (dōryō, coworker). Put officials together with their colleagues and you get the bureaucracy, or one bureaucrat within it.
官 — roof 宀 + mound/many 㠯
Originally a pictograph showing a building (roof 宀) over stacked mounds or seats (㠯), depicting an official residence or government office. The meaning extended from the building itself to the officials who worked there, and then broadly to 'official' or 'government.'