Japanese script reform

From the start of the Meiji period, attempts were made to correlate standard spoken Japanese with the written word; this issue was known in Japan as 国語国字問題 kokugo kokuji mondai 'national language national script problem'.

These reforms led to the modern Japanese written language, and explain the arguments for official policies used to determine the usage and teaching of rarely used kanji in Japan.

History

Before the Second World War

There is general a misconception that the abolition of kanji through the modernising of kana usage and the issuing a list of a limited number of officially accepted characters originated with the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. However, a strategy had already been drawn up before this by advocates of kanji eradication. At the end of Taishō period the proposal was put in place in a number of regions and overseas territories.

In November 1922 the Temporary National Language Investigation Committee, the precursor to the Japanese Language Council, selected and approved a list of 1963 daily use characters, the tōyō kanji. This list formed the basis of the modern jōyō kanji.

In December 1923 The committee approved a set of reforms for kana usage, the prototype for the modern kana system.

Reform

The reforms in the Japanese language after the Second World War have had a particularly large influence on accepted kanji usage in today's Japanese.

In April 1946 Naoya Shiga wrote about what he called 'the language problem' in the magazine Kaizō. He suggested that Japanese be done away with and that French, the most beautiful language in the world to his mind, should be adopted. On 12 November of the same year the Yomiuri Shinbun daily newspaper published an editorial regarding the abolition of kanji.

On the 31 March of the same year, the first American Education Delegation, invited by the SCAP, issued the First Report of the American Education Delegation, which pointed out the problems of using kanji and advocated the conveniences of rōmaji. As a result, the abolition of kanji became a policy of the SCAP, and the tōyō kanji list and modern kana usage proposals were drawn up with this aim in mind.

Tōyō kanji

The tōyō kanji were a list of 1850 Chinese characters, published by the cabinet on 16 November 1946 in a collection of related bulletins entitled Towards the Abolition of Kanji, to limit the number of characters available. This list defined kanji that should not be in daily use and limited the kanji the could be used in official publications and by the general public.

Previous to this, an attempt had been made to simplify a number of common and complex characters. However, his was not a systematic simplification of elements and radicals in the way China would develop its simplified Chinese characters in the following decade. In Japan the changes were based on commonly used abbreviations for individual characters.

An attempt was made to limit the number of kanji readings but the first list was too restrictive. For example, the character 魚'fish' had its readings limited to gyo and uo; the more common reading sakana was not officially recognised. These shortcoming were eventually acknowledged and on 28 June 1972 a revised list of tōyō kanji was published.

On 5 July 1956, in order to smooth the introduction of the tōyō kanji, the Japanese Language Council announced a list of substitute characters for words that contained characters not on the official list. This is use of alternative, common kanji in place of rarer ones is known as kakikae.

Words that had several ways of being written were unified using the form that used characters from the list. The list below has some examples, with the non-tōyō kanji in brackets.

注文（註文）chūmon 'order, request'
遺跡（遺蹟）kiseki '(historic) ruins'
更生（甦生）kōsei 'rebirth' (originally read sosei, and may written as 蘇生 to reflect this)
知恵（智慧）chie 'wisdom'
略奪（掠奪）ryakudatsu 'pillage, plunder'
妨害（妨碍、妨礙）bōgai 'jamming, interference'
意向（意嚮）ikō 'intention, idea'
講和（媾和）kōwa 'reconciliation, peace'
格闘（挌闘）kakutō 'fist fight'
書簡（書翰）shokan 'letter, epistle'

Generally jargon and other specialist words that had more than one way of writing were also to be written using characters from the list.

骨格（骨骼）kokkaku 'skeletal structure'
奇形（畸形）kikei 'birth defect'

Other words that used kanji not included in the list were given phonetic substitutes.

防御（防禦）bōgyo 'defence'
扇動（煽動）sendō 'abet, agitate'
英知（叡智）eichi 'wisdom'
混交（混淆）konkō 'mix together'
激高（激昂）gekikō 'excited, enraged'

At the time of the introduction of the tōyō kanji, the use of ruby characters, or furigana, to indicate the reading in kana of difficult kanji had enormous printing costs associated with it due to difficulties in typesetting. The resulting reduction in printing costs gave the restriction and abolition of kanji serious economic advantages, and the newspapers and other media corporations were heavily involved in decisions made by the Japanese Language Council. The newspapers stopped using furigana in their publications with the introduction of the tōyō kanji as reduction in the number of kanji and their readings made furigana unnecessary.

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 new born babies had to be registered with a name that used only hiragana, katakana or kanji. However, in 1951 a further 92 characters not in the tōyō list were approved by the government as jinmeiyō kanji, kanji for use in personal names. This list was modified in 1997 to include a total of 285 characters. Eight characters from the original list were promoted to the 'daily use' list, now called the jōyō kanji.

Partly as a result of a ruling by Sapporo High Court that it was not acceptable that many common characters were disallowed for naming a child because they were not on the official list, on 27 September 2004 a further 488 kanji were approved. Initially 578 characters were to be added although as a result of public feedback, some inappropriate characters were removed from the list: e.g. 怨 'grudge, resent', 痔 'haemorrhoids' and 屍 'corpse'.

Criticisms

Created as a step towards the abolition of kanji, the tōyō kanji list was frequently criticised. In 1958 Tsuneari Fukuda wrote in the magazine Koe that it had become clear that it was not possible to limit kanji. In 1961 several prominent anti-reformists walked out of the Japanese Language Council general meeting on the grounds that the phoneticists had taken over the council and the same members were being elected time and again.

The following year, Japanese Language Council member Tomizō Yoshida declared that the council should base their reforms on standardising the current writing system, using a mixture kanji and kana.

Morito Tatsuo, the then chairman of the council, announced in 1965 that this would become council policy and that the abolition of kanji was now inconceivable.

Kana usage

On 16 November 1946 kana use was officially reformed to reflect modern pronunciation whilst still being based on historical usage.

This was initially intended to be a step towards a phonetic written language using kana, but it was realised that it was not possible to perfectly represent the sounds of Japanese in kana, so the system has not been further modernised. The government confirmed that it would not be changed in the near future on 1 July 1985.

Therefore, still being in an intermediary state, modern usage has various incongruities.

Three particles maintain their historical kana form: the topic marker wa is written は ha instead of わ, the direction marker e is written へ he instead of え and the object marker o is written with the archaic kana を wo and not お.
The sounds ji and zu are usually written with the kana じ and ず 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, ぢ and づ are used. For example, 鼻血 hanaji 'nose bleed' consists of 鼻 hana 'nose' and 血 'chi' 'blood'. As chi is written using a kana ち, hanaji is written はなぢ, adding a dakuten &#12441 to the original kana to indicate that it is voiced.
ぢ and づ are also used in words of Japanese origin if the preceding kana is the unvoiced form of the same. For example つづく and ちぢむ are written in this manner, although the Korean dish buchimgae known in Japan as chijimi should correctly be written チジミ and not チヂミ as it is not a native Japanese word.^[1]
In words of Chinese origin, ぢ and づ are never used. The character 通 usually has the reading tsū, but in compounds where it is read zū, 融通 yūzū 'flexibility' is it written ゆうずう, with no regard for its usual pronunciation.

Jōyō kanji and JIS

The jōyō kanji are a list of 1945 kanji published by the government in 1981 as a replacement for the tōyō kanji. The new list was based on the old, although compared to the eradicative aims of the tōyō kanji the new list is more a guide to kanji usage.

At about the same the government was debating kanji use, the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JIS) were attempting to create a standardised kanji character set for use in computing and word processors, and to assign a unique character code to each kanji for data processing.

The character set was, like the jōyō kanji, merely a subset of the thousands of documented kanji and the list became colloquially known as the JIS kanji set. The character set has undergone several revisions since its inception.

The first was published in 1978 as standard JIS C 6226 and contained 6802 characters. This is sometimes called the old JIS kanji set.

After the creation of the jōyō kanji in 1983, JIS C 6226 was expanded to include 6877 characters, including some non-kanji characters. This is known as the new JIS kanji set, and in 1987 was designated JIS X 0208.

Approximately 200 characters were changed from their traditional for to a simplified form in the change from the old JIS to the new JIS set, meaning that documents written in the old set that used the traditional forms would not display the same characters when displayed on a system using the new character set.

The JIS character set makes no distinction between the form of a character, so it is not possible to distinguish between traditional and modified forms. However, some characters, such as 剣, 劒 and 劍, despite being variations of the same character, are distinguished.

Gaiji

The growth in the use of kana to kanji conversion on word processors and computers in the middle of the 1980s brought huge changes to the amount of Japanese written by hand. This had the effect of increasing the use of kanji outside of the jōyō kanji, known as gaiji, literally 'outside characters', reversing the general trend of using fewer kanji.

The preface to Japanese Language Council internal report on the jōyō kanji states that the Japanese Language Council's decision on the forms of characters not in approved list is pending, and will await research from each field.^[2] The new JIS character set extends kanji simplification to gaiji, creating a discrepancy between the normal form of characters used in literature and material produced on a computer or word processor. There has been some pressure for the publishing world to adopt the new JIS character set abbreviations, and the resulting variation in gaiji led the Japanese Language Council, in their final report of December 2000, to produce a list of standard forms for many of these kanji to be used as a guideline.^[3]

The list was based on non-jōyō kanji character forms used in printed material and contained a representative 1022 characters, the majority of the traditional forms being used in the standard print type face. 22 of these characters were simplified common forms, and the abbreviated forms of three radicals were acknowledged as permissible alternatives. Compare the radicals of 迚 and 道, 祼 and 神, 飩 and 飲, the former having the traditional radical. However, the general policy was to use traditional forms for all non-jōyō kanji.

Newspaper publishers were formerly firm advocates of reducing the number of kanji, although after the publication of the standard forms for gaiji the reduction of mazegaki in newspaper jargon became a matter for investigation. Subsequent issues of the Journalists' Handbook of Newspaper Character Usage had a tendency to increase the number of permissible characters, so that former mazegaki words could be written in kanji. As newpapers began to use computerised typsetting, some newspapers reintroduced ruby characters to indicate the reading of uncommon kanji, and although it was not a unified movement, there was a general trend towards increased kanji use. Other mass media followed suit, and the NHK New Character Use Dictionary also reduced mazegaki.

There were some substantial differences between parts of the gaiji list of recommended forms and JIS forms, although this was corrected in 2004 as JIS X 0213, bringing JIS inline with the Japanese Language Council. The changes to the list of kanji for names by the Ministry of Justice in the same year, for the most part also conformed to this standard printed forms, 芦 being an exception. Computers also moved towards a standard form following the printed character forms. However, personal and place names and other proper nouns that use gaiji were not included, and as JIS X 0213:2004 could make no distinction between character forms many standard printing forms differed the form used in proper nouns, possibly causing some confusion. For example, the character 辻 has a common printed form with a single dot in its radical 辶, although in names it is usually written with two dots 辶.

The jōyō kanji and the kanji for names were not included on the 2000 list of gaiji forms, although the kanji for names were also standardised in the same year. The characters 曙 and 蓮 were also standardised, making the forms 曙, with a dot in the middle of 者, and 蓮, with two dots on 辶, non-standard. These kanji were not changed in the alterations made to the list in the 2004 as standard JIS X 0213. Conversely, the two characters 堵 and 逢, added to the list in 2004, do have a standard printed form with a dot in the middle of 者 and two dots on 辶, and were amended accordingly in JIS X 0213.

Main historical advocates of reform

The use of kanji as part of Japanese orthography has been a matter of debate since at least the end of the Edo period. The use of kanji has been criticised for various reasons. Some of the main criticisms have been:

There are many kanji and it is not easy to remember how to read and write them.
The Latin alphabet is widely used internationally; using kanji separates Japan from much of the rest of the world. After the appearance of the typewriter and computer this argument was used from a technical point of view
Compared to text that uses only kana or rōmaji, text that uses a mixture of kanji and kana requires Japanese input methods which is inefficient.

The policies of kanji reduction and erradication became a matter of national interest as a result of these arguments.

The abolition of kanji is often referenced, although it was in 1866 that Maejima Hisoka proposed the idea to the shōgun Tokugawa Yoshinobu in a report entitled The Argument for the Abolition of Kanji. The report argued that kanji should be abolished as the acquisition of kanji was not efficient. In recent years the existence of this proposal has come into question and an attempt at further investigation was the subject of a graduation thesis of the department of Literary History at Risshō University in 1999. Other advocates of kanji reform include:

Kamonomabuchi 国意考 Kokuikō
- Kamonomabuchi was critical of the number of kanji and argued that kana were more convenient, being phonetic characters like the alphabet. The examples were given of a French dictionary being written using only 50 characters and Dutch using only 25 characters.
Motoori Norinaga 玉勝間 Tamakatsu
Fukuzawa Yukichi Moji no kyō 'The teaching of characters' 1873
Maejima Hisoka Kanji go-haishi no gi 'The Argument for the Abolition of Kanji' 1866
Nishi Amane 洋字ヲ以テ国語ヲ書スルノ論 Yōji wo nite kokugo wo suru no ron 'Argument for writing Japanese is Western script' (Advocating the use of rōmaji.)
Suematsu Kenchō 日本文章論 Nihon bunshōron 'Japanese Syntax' 1886
Ueda Kazutoshi
Mori Arinori 日本の教育 Nihon no kyōiku 'Japanese Education' (Advocating the use of English)
Nanbu Yoshikazu (Advocated the use of rōmaji)
Baba Tatsuo 日本語文典 Nihongo Bunten 'Japanese Grammar'
Shiga Naoya 国語問題 Kokugo Mondai 'The Language Problem' (Kaizō April 1946）

Current issues

Mazegaki and kakikae

The problem of mazegaki, mixing kanji and kana a word of Chinese origin, often seen in modern Japanese, originated with the modern reformations, particularly the introduction of the tōyō kanji. The intention was that words requiring characters that were not included in the list should be substituted with a suitable synonym, although in reality the rule was circumvented by writing these kanji in kana and making mazegaki commonplace. The words 改ざん kaizan 'falsify', 破たん hatan 'failure, bankruptcy', 隠ぺい inpei 'concealed', 漏えい rōsetsu 'leakage', 覚せい剤 kakuseizai 'stimulant' are all usually written as mazekaki. The alternative kanji forms are 改竄, 破綻, 隠蔽蔽, 漏洩 or 漏泄, and 覚醒剤 respectively. The use of mazegaki is not enforced and is rarely used in literature, although it is commonly used by some newspapers, broadcasters and other media outlets. The argument for using mazegaki is that it makes content easier to read and attracts a wider audience. Even some jōyō kanji may be written in this way in television programmes aimed at younger children.

As they are phonetic substitutions, one of the problems using mazegaki and kakikae is that the original meaning of the word is not clear from the characters. Kanji have both sound and meaning, and compounds are created by combining both. For example, the 破 of 破たん hatan means 'rip', but the たん is kana tan and does not carry any meaning. The word 沈澱 chinden 'settlement (of sediment)' is a combination of the characters 沈 'to sink' and 澱 'sediment', so the meaning is evident from the kanji. However, 澱 has been substituted with 殿 'Mr, lord', a similar character with the same pronunciation but a different meaning. The combination 沈殿 could now be construed to mean 'sinking lord'. Although there are some examples where kakikae has not a detrimental effect, for the most part the substitutions have been purely phonetic and the practices of mazegaki and kakikae have been criticised for legitimising sloppy Japanese and eroding part of Japanese culture.

However, as the age of computers has made it easier for Japanese speakers to see and use rarer characters, the idea of a list of approved characters is currently being reconsidered; more and more media is using non-approved kanji with furigana and less mazegaki.

Variant characters in Microsoft Windows

In 2005 Microsoft announced that the fonts Meiryo, MS Gothic and MS Minchō MS in its Windows Vista operating system would comply with JIS X 0213:2004. Whilst this removed incompatibilities with the accepted gaiji forms in the Windows environment, it did raise concerns that characters would be displayed differently depending on the version of windows used, re-creating the problems that occurred in the shift from the old to the new JIS character set. Microsoft allayed these fears by announcing that the standard Japanese fonts on Vista would be OpenType compatible, and old character forms could also be used by converting between variant forms. The Adobe applications InDesign, Illustrator and others, allow conversion of variant forms in software that have full support for OpenType.^[4] However, there are very few other applications that supported Open Type released with Windows Vista, with even Microsoft's own Office 2007 not supporting conversion of variant kanji forms, meaning the function is all but useless without purchasing a bundle of professional standard DTP software.

References

Related organisations

Nippon-no-Rômazi-Sya [2] (For the promotion of rōmaji) Template:Ja icon
The Society for the Romanization of the Japanese Alphabet [3] (For the promotion of rōmaji) Template:Ja icon
Kanamojikai [4] (For the promotion of kana only script) Template:Ja icon