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: categorized by history

Kokuji

While some kanji and Chinese hanzi are mutually readable, many more are not. In addition to characters that have different meanings in Japanese, and characters that have identical meanings but are written differently, there are also characters peculiar to Japanese known as kokuji (??; literally "national characters"). Kokuji are also known as wasei kanji (????; lit. "Chinese characters made in Japan"). There are hundreds of kokuji (see the sci.lang.japan AFAQ list), and although some are rarely used, many others have become important additions to the written Japanese language. These include:

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• ? t?ge (mountain pass)
• ? sakaki (sakaki tree, genus Camellia)
• ? hatake (field of crops)
• ? tsuji (crossroads, street)
• ? d?, hatara(ku) (work)

Kokkun

In addition to kokuji, there are kanji that have been given meanings in Japanese different from their original Chinese meanings. These kanji are not considered kokuji but are instead called kokkun (??) and include characters such as:

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• ? oki (offing, offshore; Ch. ch?ng rinse)
• ? mori (forest; Ch. s?n gloomy, majestic, luxuriant growth)
• ? tsubaki (Camellia japonicus; Ch. ch?n Ailantus)

Old characters and new characters

The same kanji character can sometimes be written in two different ways, ??? (ky?-jitai; lit. "old character") (??? in ky?-jitai) and ??? (shin-jitai; "new character"). The following are some examples of ky?-jitai followed by the corresponding shin-jitai:

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• ? ? kuni (country)
• ? ? g? (number)
• ? ? hen, ka(waru) (change)

Ky?-jitai were used before the end of World War II, and are mostly, if not completely, the same as the Traditional Chinese characters. After the war the government introduced the simplified shin-jitai. Some of the new characters are similar to simplified characters used in the People's Republic of China. Also, like the simplification process in China, some of the shinjitai were once abbreviated forms (?? ryakuji) used in handwriting, but in contrast with the "proper" unsimplified characters (?? seiji) were only acceptable in colloquial contexts. This page http://kan-chan.stbbs.net/word/ryakuji.html shows examples of these handwritten abbreviations, identical to their modern shinjitai forms, from the postwar era. There are also handwritten simplifications today that are significantly simpler than their standard forms (either untouched or received only minor simplification in the post-war reforms), examples of which can be seen here http://hac.cside.com/bunsho/1shou/39setu.html, but despite their wide usage and popularity, they, like their postwar counterparts, are not considered socially acceptable and are only used in handwriting.

Related Topics:
World War II - Traditional Chinese - After the war - Simplified characters - People's Republic of China

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There are also Chinese characters that are only used phonetically in Japanese (??? ateji), and many Chinese characters that are not used in Japanese at all. Theoretically, however, any Chinese character can also be a Japanese character?the Morohashi Daikanwa Jiten, the largest dictionary of kanji ever compiled, has close to 50,000 entries, even though some of those entries have never been used in Japanese.

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