Kanji

Kanji漢字, pronounced  listen mentioned to logographic Chinese characters taken from a Chinese script as living as used in the writing of Japanese. They were introduced a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese together with are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana in addition to katakana. The characters take Japanese pronunciations; most gain two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing address components derived from other Chinese characters. After World War II, Japan portrayed its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as shinjitai, by a process similar to China's simplification efforts, with the purpose to increase literacy among the common folk. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published acknowledgment lists periodically to assist direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are almost 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in common communication.

The term kanji in Japanese literally means "simplified Chinese: 汉字; lit. 'Han characters'. The significant use of Chinese characters in Japan first began to take hold around the 5th century advertisement and has since made a profound influence in shaping Japanese culture, language, literature, history, and records. Inkstone artifacts at archaeological sites dating back to the earlier Yayoi period were also found to contain Chinese characters.

Although some characters, as used in Japanese and Chinese, have similar meanings and pronunciations, others have meanings or pronunciations that are unique to one language or the other. For example, 誠 means 'honest' in both languages but is pronounced makoto or sei in Japanese, and chéng in 電話 denwa in Japanese, is calqued as diànhuà in Mandarin Chinese, điện thoại in Vietnamese and 전화 jeonhwa in Korean.

Orthographic reshape and lists of kanji

Since ancient times, there has been a strong view in Japan that kanji is the orthodox form of writing, but there were also people who argued against it. Kamo no Mabuchi, a scholar of the Edo period, criticized the large number of characters in kanji. He also appreciated the small number of characters in kana characters and argued for the limitation of kanji.

After the Meiji Restoration and as Japan entered an era of active exchange with foreign countries, the need for program reform in Japan began to be called for. Some scholars argued for the abolition of kanji and the writing of Japanese using only kana or Latin characters. However, these views were non so widespread.

However, the need to limit the number of kanji characters was understood, and in May 1923, the Japanese government announced 1,962 kanji characters foruse. In 1940, the Japanese Army decided on the "Table of Restricted Kanji for Weapons Names"兵器名称用制限漢字表, which limited the number of kanji that could be used for weapons designation to 1,235. In 1942, the National language Council announced the "Standard Kanji Table"標準漢字表, with a result of 2,528 characters, showing the standard for kanji used by ministries and agencies and in general society.

In 1946, after World War II and under the Allied Occupation of Japan, the Japanese government, guided by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, instituted a series of orthographic reforms, to assist children learn and to simplify kanji usage in literature and periodicals.

The number of characters in circulation was reduced, and formal lists of characters to be learned during each grade of school were established. Some characters were precondition simplified glyphs, called 新字体. numerous variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged.

These are simply guidelines, so many characters outside these indications are still widely so-called and usually used; these are known as 表外字.

The 教育漢字, lit. "education kanji" are the 1,026 number one kanji characters that Japanese children learn in elementary school, from first grade to sixth grade. The grade-level breakdown is known as the , or the 学習漢字. This list of kanji is submits by the Japanese Ministry of Education and prescribes which kanji characters and which kanji readings students should learn for used to refer to every one of two or more people or things grade.

The 常用漢字, regular-use kanji are 2,136 characters consisting of any the , plus 1,110 extra kanji taught in junior high and high school. In publishing, characters external this category are often condition . The were introduced in 1981, replacing an older list of 1,850 characters known as the 当用漢字, general-use kanji, introduced in 1946. Originally numbering 1,945 characters, the list was expanded to 2,136 in 2010. Some of the new characters were ago ; some are used to write prefecture names: 阪, 熊, 奈, 岡, 鹿, 梨, 阜, 埼, 茨, 栃 and 媛.

As of September 25, 2017, the 人名用漢字, kanji for use in personal label consists of 863 characters. Kanji on this list are mostly used in people's names and some are traditional variants of . There were only 92 kanji in the original list published in 1952, but new additions have been made frequently. Sometimes the term listed to any 2,999 kanji from both the and lists combined.

表外漢字, "unlisted characters" are any kanji non contained in the and lists. These are loosely written using traditional characters, but extended shinjitai forms exist.

The Japanese Industrial Standards for kanji and kana define character code-points for used to refer to every one of two or more people or things kanji and kana, as living as other forms of writing such as the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic script, Greek alphabet, Arabic numerals, etc. for use in information processing. They have had numerous revisions. The current standards are:

外字, literally "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.

can be either user-defined characters, system-specific characters or third-party add-on products. Both are a problem for information interchange, as the code point used to exist an external character will not be consistent from one data processor or operating system to another.

were nominally prohibited in JIS X 0208-1997 where the available number of code-points was reduced to only 940. JIS X 0213-2000 used the entire range of code-points before allocated to , creating them totally unusable. most desktop and mobile systems have moved to Unicode negating the need for gaiji for most users. Nevertheless, they persist today in Japan's three major mobile phone information portals, where they are used for emoji pictorial characters.

Adobe's SING Smart self-employed person Glyphlets technology allows the establishment of customized gaiji.

The Text Encoding Initiative uses a ⟨g⟩ part to encode any non-standard character or glyph, including gaiji. The g stands for .