Origin

The character 倣 combines a person radical on the left, which marks it as relating to human behavior or action, with the character 放 on the right, which serves as a sound hint indicating roughly how to pronounce the word. The meaning of "emulate" or "imitate" comes from the idea of a person following or copying after someone else — when you imitate, you're doing what another person does. Over time, this visual combination of "person" plus a sound guide became the standard way to write this concept in Japanese kanji.