It's listed in the Unicode character database, but I doubt that it was in (m)any fonts 20 years ago, it would have been in zero printed books [0], and nobody knew the meaning of the character, so I'd argue that it's more an artifact of the Unicode compilation process than a "real" character.
reply[0]: Aside from the "Overview of National Administrative Districts" book mentioned in the article
You don't need (m)any fonts, only need one font used by the book and you can get it the same way it was originally done - gluing some parts of other characters together. Or you could just draw it if the Unicode version is too dissimilar from the book version for a reliable OCR.
(though if the character came from this single book, likely the Unicode reference is its replica?)
reply