Kanji Comeback

By Matthew Ward | Tuesday, Sep 2, 2008

Jouyou Kanji, or "common-use Chinese characters," are the group of standard characters that are taught in the Japanese public school system.   The list originated from language reforms that were carried out in the early part of the 20th century, making the language easier to read and write by reducing and simplying the Chinese characters used in Japanese. 

Since then, the list has been revised every few decades, reflecting changes in the Japanese language.  Some kanji have been eliminated from the list and others have been added over time.  The latest revisions by the Ministry of Education, finalized this July, involve the biggest changes yet.  Five characters are being eliminated, while a whopping 188 are being added to the list, turning the former 1945 characters into 2133.

In a previous article (http://www.seekjapan.jp/article/1716/Kazuhide's+Linguistic+Myths), I pointed out an interesting irony:  while the public perception is that the use of computers and cellphones is reducing the ability of people to use kanji, the ease of inputting the characters with a few electronic strokes means that the number of kanji used in Japanese is actually increasing:  Many characters that have long been written in kana are now coming back because it is easier to write them electronically.   The ability of people to handwrite the Chinese characters has indeed been decreasing from lack of practice, but at the same time, difficult kanji have actually become more accessible in Japanese society.   This is one of the reasons for the sharp rise in the number of officially used characters in the latest revision. 

A related factor seems to simply be practicality:  there have long been widely used kanji characters that were not officially acknowledged.  Apparently, the most controversial example from the newest revision is 俺　(ore), an extremely common rough version of the pronoun "I" used by men.  It seems that some of the people on the committee were resistant to making this character official, but practicality won out.  I can say myself that although while I can't ever remember seeing 俺 used in Chinese, I picked it up after moving to Japan just from seeing it so much (probably my love of Japanese punk rock had something to do with it--it's a familiar sight on lyric sheets!)

Indeed, a lot of the new additions to the list seem to be quite commonly used in Japanese, and I personally had no idea that they weren't already part of the Jouyou list.  They include characters like 鍋　(nabe; "pot,") 尻 (shiri; "butt"), 枕　(makura; "pillow), 鍵 (kagi; "key), 頃 (goro; "around, about") and 岡　(oka, as found in quite a number of personal and place names like Okayama, Nagaoka, Okamoto, etc.)  Sure, all of these words above can be written in kana, but in practical reality, it seems that they are mostly written in kanji in modern Japanese. 

So, what does all of this mean for the learner of Japanese as a foreign language?  Can it be that the government has just made the dreaded Japanese writing system even more difficult?  Not really.  The refreshingly descriptive approach used in the current revision of the Jouyou Kanji list seems to merely reflect the reality of actual usage.  Japanese is simultaneously getting easier to write (after all, it's not too hard to type on a computer with romaji input), and more difficult to write, due to the increase in number of commonly used kanji and the reduced need to practice handwriting them. Since most foreign language learners of Japanese use the list as a guide for what they should study, the inclusion of commonly used characters should actually be helpful to learners. In reality.  Seeing that language change is an unavoidable fact of life, it is a good thing that the Jouyou Kanji list is now more in line with actual usage. 

Matthew Ward's Profile

Late 30's, have lived in Asia for a lot of my life.

Interests: Music, politics, linguistics, learning languages, culture, food, traveling.

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