The Kanji cup makes another appearance in the piece about him. I have to say, after reading the article, the message he is probably trying to send is that he expects to have "longevity" in the Times editor position.

Abe Rosenthal, the totemic New York Times editor who published the Pentagon Papers, used to say that there was one path to the executive editor’s office — over the dead, burned, and maimed bodies of the ten other people who wanted the job. So I turned to Joseph Kahn, the new top dog at the Times, and asked whom he incinerated to get here.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said, suppressing a sly smile. It was late last Friday afternoon — just days before it would be announced that he had ascended to journalism’s Iron Throne — and we were sitting in a conference room high above the empty newsroom. “The truth is that we’re in a bit of a different era, and some of the transitions in the past admittedly have been rocky, and there have been more abrupt changes in leadership. I think we’re going to have a really smooth change in leadership.”

Rocky? There have been four executive editors of the Times in the past two decades, and two of them — Howell Raines (2001 to 2003) and Jill Abramson (2011 to 2014) — lasted under three years, self-destructing spectacularly in public after losing the faith of the Sulzberger family. Was Kahn nervous? “I am nervous,” he told me, “for a variety of reasons. Not really because I think that I’m going to self-destruct but because it’s an enormous responsibility to manage a newsroom of this size and ambition at this particular moment in history.”

From: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/joe-kahn-new-york-times-profile.html