Pre-World War II reforms A misconception is held that Japanese script reform originated from the
Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers during the
Occupation of Japan, but in fact, a plan had already been put into place prior to the occupation. Reform efforts date back to at least 1900, and proposals to reform kanji usage had been developed in the 1920s. In the 1900 kana usage reforms,
hentaigana (old variant forms of kana) were eliminated, though
historical kana orthography (dating to the
Heian period, a millennium before) was retained. A separate character for
n was also prescribed; previously it had been written as (the same as
mu) and was a hentaigana for both these sounds. A proposal to eliminate certain kanji from use was implemented in a number of regions and overseas territories in the 1920s, near the end of the
Taishō period. In November 1922, the , the precursor to the
Japanese Language Council, now the Japanese Language subdivision of the
Agency for Cultural Affairs, selected and approved a list of 1,962 kanji characters for daily use. This group of characters formed the basis for the
tōyō kanji list, which eventually developed into the modern
jōyō kanji list. In December 1923, the committee approved a set of reforms for kana usage; the prototype for the modern kana system.
Reforms The reforms made after the
Second World War have had a particularly significant impact on accepted kanji usage in the modern Japanese language. On 12 November 1945, the
Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper published an editorial concerning the abolition of kanji, and on 31 March 1946, the first American Education Delegation arrived in Japan at the invitation of the
Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) and issued its first report. The report pointed out the difficulties concerning kanji use, and advocated the use of
rōmaji, which they considered more convenient. As a result, the gradual abolition of kanji became official policy for the SCAP, and the
tōyō kanji list and modern kana usage proposals were drawn up in accordance with this policy.
Tōyō kanji The
tōyō kanji list, containing 1850 characters, was published by the
cabinet on 16 November 1946 with the intention of completely abolishing the use of kanji in the future. The list reduced the number of kanji deemed appropriate for daily use, and categorized certain kanji for specific use in official publications and documents. Prior to this reform, an attempt had already been made to standardise several kanji, known as
kyūjitai, with other forms, known as
shinjitai, but was not conducted systematically. For new character forms, changes were only made to several characters with minimal modifications. Another separate attempt was made to limit the number of
kanji readings, but the first list proved much too restrictive. For instance, the character for fish had its readings limited to
gyo and
uo when the most common reading,
sakana, was not officially recognized by the list. These shortcomings were acknowledged in the revised list of
tōyō kanji, published on 28 June 1972. On 5 July 1956, the
Japanese Language Council announced a list of substitute characters for words that contained characters not on the official list in an effort to ease the implementation of
tōyō kanji. This use of alternative, common kanji in place of rarer ones was called (also written as ). Different characters for words were unified using characters from the
tōyō kanji list. The list below shows some examples, with the non-
tōyō kanji placed in brackets. •
chūmon (order, request) •
iseki (historic ruins) •
kōsei (rebirth, originally read
sosei, and may be written as to reflect the original reading) •
chie (wisdom) •
ryakudatsu (pillage, plunder) •
bōgai (jamming, interference) •
ikō (intention, idea) •
kōwa (reconciliation, peace) •
kakutō (fighting) •
shokan (letter, epistle)
Jargon and other specialized words that could be written in more than one way were generally written using characters from the list. •
kokkaku (skeletal structure) •
kikei (birth defect) Other words that used kanji that were not included in the list were given phonetic substitutes. •
bōgyo (defence) •
sendō (abet, agitate) •
eichi (wisdom) •
konkō (mix) •
gekikō (excited, enraged) For kanji compounds with characters that could not be reasonably substituted, the recommendation was to write the "missing" kanji in
kana instead, a practice known as , which is very common in
the name of chemical elements. •
hifu (skin) •
izoku (Yi people) •
fusso (fluorine) •
tanpakushitsu (protein) •
yū-utsu (melancholy) and
utsubyō (depression) However, the recent prevalence of
computers has made it easier for Japanese speakers to identify and use rarer characters, and the idea of having a list of approved characters has come under reconsideration.
Japanese media have increasingly used non-approved kanji with
furigana to aid the reader in place of
mazegaki.
Kanji for names On 16 February 1948, 881 of the
tōyō kanji were designated to be taught during primary education, and became known as the
kyōiku kanji (education kanji). In the same year, Article 50 of the
family register law made it illegal to name a child using characters not on the official list. When this law first came into effect, the
Ministry of Justice declared that all newborn babies must be registered in the
koseki (the Japanese family registry) with a name that used only
hiragana,
katakana or
tōyō kanji. However, in 1951, an additional 92 characters were approved by the government as
jinmeiyō kanji; kanji acceptable for use in names. This list was modified in 1997 to increase to a total of 285 characters. At the time, eight characters from the original
jinmeiyō kanji list were added to the
jōyō kanji (daily use) list, and were removed from the group of
jinmeiyō kanji. On 27 September 2004, another 488 kanji were approved for use in names, partly as a result of the ruling by the
Sapporo High Court that it was unacceptable for so many common characters to be excluded from use in names simply because they were not part of the official list. 578 characters were initially added, though some characters unsuitable for names such as (grudge, resent), (haemorrhoids) and (corpse) were removed as a result of public feedback.
Criticisms The
tōyō kanji list, which was created as a step towards the abolition of kanji, had undergone frequent criticism by scholars. In 1958,
Tsuneari Fukuda wrote an article in the magazine
Koe pointing out that it was impossible to restrict kanji use, and in 1961, several prominent anti-reformists walked out of the Japanese Language Council general meeting in protest of the dominance of the phoneticists, who were always re-elected to their positions on the council. The following year, Japanese Language Council member
Tomizō Yoshida argued that the council should base their reforms on standardising the current writing system using a mixture of
kanji and
kana, and in 1965,
Morito Tatsuo, the then chairman of the council, announced that the complete abolition of kanji was now inconceivable and that Yoshida's suggestion would become official policy.
Modern kana usage On 16 November 1946,
historical kana usage underwent official reform to reflect modern pronunciation as . In addition, two kana,
wi and
we, were officially declared obsolete, as the pronunciations they represented had dropped from the language many centuries before. Some reformers wished to eliminate kanji altogether, and have a phonetic written language only using kana, but this was decided against, and further reforms were halted. Modern kana usage still has one or two incongruities, as reform was halted at an intermediate stage. On 1 July 1985, the government confirmed that no further reforms would be made in the near future. • Three
particles maintain their historical kana form: the topic marker
wa is written
ha instead of , the direction marker
e is written
he instead of and the object marker
o is written with the otherwise archaic kana
wo instead of . • The sounds
ji and
zu are usually written with the kana and respectively, with two exceptions. In compound words of Japanese origin where the second element normally begins
chi or
tsu and is
voiced in the compound, the kana and are used instead. For example,
hanaji (nose bleed) consists of
hana (nose) and
chi (blood). As
chi is written using the
kana ,
hanaji is written , adding a
dakuten to the original kana to indicate that it is
voiced. This is a form of
morpho-phonemic orthography, to indicate that it comes from voicing a rather than voicing a or being an unrelated . • and are also used in words of Japanese origin if the preceding kana is the unvoiced form of the same character. For example, the words and are written in this manner, though the correct kana usage for
chijimi (the Japanese word for the Korean dish
buchimgae) is , as opposed to , as the word is not native to the language. • and are never used for words of Chinese origin. The character is usually read
tsū, but in compounds it may be read as
zū (for instance,
yūzū (flexibility) is written ) with no regard to its usual pronunciation.
Reintroduction of older kanji in mass media When reporting the lawsuits regarding cases of
Minamata disease in 1970, the non-tōyō kanji
on, "grudge", was used to refer to the feelings of the bereaved families. As a result of this widespread coverage, this kanji was reintroduced into popular usage, which opened the door for many more kanji to be rehabilitated.
Jōyō kanji and the Japanese Industrial Standards The
jōyō kanji list, consisting at that time of 1,945 characters, was published by the Japanese government in 1981 to serve as a replacement for the
tōyō kanji list. This newer list was based on the older
tōyō kanji list, though
jōyō kanji was more of a guide to kanji usage while
tōyō kanji was created to gradually eliminate kanji usage. Around the same time, the
Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JIS) also attempted to create a standardised kanji
character set for use in
computing and
word processing, and to assign a unique
character code to each kanji for data processing. This character set was, like the
jōyō kanji, merely a subset of the thousands of documented kanji, and became known colloquially as the JIS kanji set. The character set has undergone several revisions since its inception. The first of these, officially known as
JIS C 6226, or more commonly as the old JIS kanji set, was published in 1978 and contained 6802 characters. After the creation of the
jōyō kanji list in 1983, the old set was expanded to contain 6877 characters, including some non-kanji characters. This is known as the new JIS kanji set, and was designated as
JIS X 0208 in 1987. Approximately 200 characters were changed from their traditional form to their simplified form in the change from the old JIS to the new JIS set, meaning that documents written on computers using the old character set would not display the same characters when displayed on a computer that used the new character set. The JIS character set makes no distinction between the forms of characters, so it is not possible to distinguish between traditional and simplified forms. However, some characters, such as , , and , are distinguished within the character set, despite being variations of the same character.
Gaiji Increased use of
kana to kanji conversion on word processors and computers during the mid-1980s brought drastic changes to the amount of Japanese written by hand. As a result, the use of kanji outside the
jōyō kanji increased, reversing the prior trend of using fewer kanji. These characters were called
gaiji (lit. "outside characters"). The preface to the Japanese Language Council internal report on the
jōyō kanji states that the council's decision on the forms of characters not on the approved list is pending, and will await research from each field. The new JIS character set
extends kanji simplification to
gaiji, creating a discrepancy between the standard forms of characters used in literature and materials produced on a computer or word processor. There is pressure for the Japanese publishing industry to adopt the new JIS character set abbreviations, and the resulting variation in
gaiji led the Japanese Language Council, in their final report in December 2000, to produce a list of standard forms for many of these kanji to be used as a guideline. This list is called the in Japan. This list was compiled by researching the various gaiji forms used in printed materials, and 1022 major characters were given standard forms to be used in print type face. 22 of these characters were simplified common forms, and the abbreviated forms of three
radicals were acknowledged as permissible alternatives for these characters. However, the general policy of the list was to use traditional forms for all gaiji. Though newspaper publishers had been firm advocates for reducing the number of kanji, the release of the
gaiji list forced them to reduce
mazegaki in newspaper print. Subsequent issues of the tended to increase the number of permissible characters, so that former
mazegaki words could be written as kanji (for example, the use of in place of or in place of ). As newspapers began to use computerised typesetting, some newspapers reintroduced
ruby characters to indicate the reading of uncommon kanji. Though not a unified movement, there was a general trend towards increased kanji use. Other mass media organizations followed suit, and the also reduced the amount of
mazegaki used. There were substantial discrepancies between the
gaiji list and JIS forms, but these discrepancies were corrected in 2004 with the release of
JIS X 0213, which brought the JIS in line with the Japanese Language Council. The changes in
jinmeiyō kanji made by the
Ministry of Justice during the same year also conformed to this standard printed form, with being an exception. Computers have also moved towards a standard form following the printed character forms. However, JIS X 0213 subsumes personal place names and other proper nouns that were excluded from the
gaiji list, so confusion may still result for characters like , where the character form differs between the printed standard and naming standard.
Jōyō kanji and
jinmeiyō kanji (list as of 2000) were not included on the
gaiji list, so the standards for those characters are the forms used in the jinmeiyō kanji list. Similarly, and , which were added to the jinmeiyō kanji list in 1990, remain the standard forms for the same reason, even though traditional forms exist for those characters (a dot in the middle of for , and a double-dotted radical for ). These kanji remained unchanged in the alterations made to the list in 2004. On the other hand, the characters 堵 and 逢, which were added to the jinmeiyō kanji list in 2004, do have a standard printed form with a dot in the middle of and two dots on the radical, and were amended accordingly in JIS X 0213. ==Historical advocates for reform==