The Japanese script reform is the attempt to correlate standard spoken Japanese with the written word, which began during the Meiji period. This issue is known in Japan as the . The reforms led to the development of the modern Japanese written language, and explain the arguments for official policies used to determine the usage and teaching of kanji rarely used in Japan.
History
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.Chizimi or Chidimi? 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.NHK special 15 September 2009
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