Kanji

Kanji ({{Audio|ja-kanji.ogg|??}}, literally "Han characters") are Chinese characters used in Japanese. Kanji are one of the five character sets used in the modern Japanese writing system, the other four being hiragana, katakana, the Roman alphabet (r?maji), and Arabic numerals.

Types of kanji: by prevalence (Orthographic reform and kanji lists)

In 1946, following World War II, the Japanese government instituted a series of orthographic reforms.

Related Topics:
1946 - World War II - Orthographic

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Some characters were given simplified glyphs, called ??? (shinjitai).

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The number of characters in circulation was reduced, and formal lists of characters to be learned during each grade of school were established. Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged. This was done with the goal of facilitating learning for children and simplifying kanji use in literature and periodicals. These are simply guidelines, so many characters outside these standards are still widely known and commonly used.

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Kanji lists include:

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Education kanji (ky?iku kanji ????): 1,006 characters

Characters that Japanese children are required to learn in elementary school (881 prior to 1981). The specific grade-level breakdown of the Education kanji is known as the Gakunen-betsu kanji hait?hy? ????????), or the gakush? kanji.

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Daily-use kanji (j?y? kanji ????): 1,945 characters

These consist of all the ky?iku kanji, plus an additional 939 more difficult kanji taught in secondary school. These are taught during elementary and junior high school in Japan. In publishing for the general public, characters outside this category are often given ruby. The j?y? kanji were introduced in 1981, and they replaced an older list of 1850 characters known as the General-use kanji (t?y? kanji ????). The t?y? kanji list was introduced in 1946.

Related Topics:
Elementary - Junior high school - Ruby - T?y? kanji

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Name kanji (jinmeiy? kanji ?????): 2,928 characters

These consist of the Daily-use kanji, plus an additional 983 kanji that are no longer used for words, but are still found in people's names. Over the years, the Minister of Justice has on several occasions added to this list, based upon requests from parents. Sometimes the phrase jinmeiyo kanji refers to all 2928, and sometimes it only refers to the 983 that are only used for names.

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JIS Kanji

These standards define the character code-points for use with computers and information interchange. The JIS standards have been through numerous revisions. The current standards are:

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• JIS X 0208:1997,which is the most recent version of the main standard. It has 6,355 kanji.
• JIS X 0212:1990, which was a supplementary standard containing a further 5,801 kanji. This standard was rarely used, mainly because the common Shift_JIS encoding system could not use it. This standard is effectively obsolete;
• JIS X 0213:2000, a further revision which extended the JIS X 0208 set with 3,625 additional kanji, of which 2,741 were in JIS X 0212. The standard is in part designed to be compatible with Shift_JIS encoding;
• JIS X 0221:1995, which is the Japanese version of the original ISO 10646/Unicode standard.

Gaiji

Gaiji (??), literally meaning "external characters", are kanji that are not represented in existing Japanese encoding systems. These include variant forms of common kanji that need to be represented alongside the more conventional glyph in reference works, and can include non-kanji symbols as well.

Related Topics:
Japanese - Encoding systems - Glyph

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Gaiji can be either user-defined characters or system-specific characters. Both are a problem for information interchange, as the code-point used to represent an external character will not be consistent from one computer to another (in the former case) or from one operating system to another (in the latter).

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Gaiji were nominally prohibited in JIS X 0208-1997, while JIS X 0213-2000 actually used the range of code-points previously allocated to gaiji, making them completely unusable. Nevertheless, they persist today with NTT DoCoMo's "iMode" service, where they are used for pictorial characters.

Related Topics:
NTT DoCoMo - IMode

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Unicode allows for optional encoding of gaiji in private use areas.

Related Topics:
Unicode - Private use areas

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Total number of kanji characters

The number of possible characters is disputed. The Morohashi "Daikanwa Jiten" contains about 50,000 characters, and this was thought to be comprehensive, but more recent mainland Chinese dictionaries contain 80,000 or more characters, many consisting of obscure variants. Most of these are not in common use in either Japan or China.

Related Topics:
Morohashi - Daikanwa Jiten

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