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Kanji (; , ) are logographic Chinese characters, adapted from Chinese script, used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived Syllabary of and . The characters have Japanese ; most have two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as , by a process similar to China's simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the general public. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in common communication.
The term in Japanese literally means "Han Chinese characters". Japanese kanji and Chinese () share a common foundation. The significant use of Chinese characters in Japan first began to take hold around the 5th century AD and has since had 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, means 'honest' in both languages but is pronounced or in Japanese, and in Standard Mandarin Chinese. Individual kanji characters and multi-kanji words invented in Japan from Chinese morpheme have been borrowed into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese in recent times. These are known as Wasei-kango, or Japanese-made Chinese words. For example, the word for telephone, in Japanese, was derived from the Chinese words for "electric" and "conversation." It was then as in Mandarin Chinese, điện thoại in Vietnamese and 전화 in Korean.
人 一 日 大 年 出 本 中 子 見 国
上 分 生 行 二 間 時 気 十 女 三
前 入 小 後 長 下 学 月 何 来 話
山 高 今 書 五 名 金 男 外 四 先 川 東 聞 語 九 食 八 水 天 木 六 万 白 七 円 電 父 北 車 母 半
The earliest Japanese documents were probably written by bilingual Chinese or Korean officials employed at the Yamato period court. For example, the diplomatic correspondence from King Bu of Wa to Emperor Shun of Liu Song in 478 AD has been praised for its skillful use of allusion. Later, groups of people called were organized under the monarch to read and write Classical Chinese. During the reign of Empress Suiko (593–628), the Yamato court began sending full-scale diplomatic missions to China, which resulted in a large increase in Chinese literacy at the Japanese court.
In ancient times, paper was so rare that people wrote kanji onto thin, rectangular strips of wood, called (). These wooden boards were used for communication between government offices, tags for goods transported between various countries, and the practice of writing. The oldest written kanji in Japan discovered so far were written in ink on wood as a wooden strip dated to the 7th century, a record of trading for cloth and salt.
The Japanese language had no written form at the time Chinese characters were introduced, and texts were written and read only in Chinese. Later, during the Heian period (794–1185), a system known as emerged, which involved using Chinese text with to allow Japanese speakers to read Chinese sentences and restructure them into Japanese on the fly, by changing word order and adding particles and verb endings, in accordance with the rules of Japanese grammar. This was essentially a kind of codified translation.
Chinese characters also came to be used to write texts in the vernacular Japanese language, resulting in the modern syllabaries. Around 650 AD, a writing system called (used in the ancient poetry anthology Man'yōshū) evolved that used a number of Chinese characters for their sound, rather than for their meaning. written in Grass script evolved into (literally "fluttering " in reference to the motion of the brush during cursive writing), or , that is, "ladies' hand",Hadamitzky, Wolfgang and Spahn, Mark (2012), Kanji and Kana: A Complete Guide to the Japanese Writing System, Third Edition, Rutland, VT: Tuttle Publishing. . p. 14. a writing system that was accessible to women (who were denied higher education). Major works of Heian-era literature by women were written in . (literally "partial ", in reference to the practice of using a part of a kanji character) emerged via a parallel path: monastery students simplified to a single constituent element. Thus the two other writing systems, and , referred to collectively as , are descended from kanji. In contrast with (, literally "borrowed name", in reference to the character being "borrowed" as a label for its sound), kanji are also called (, literally "true name", in reference to the character being used as a label for its meaning).
In modern Japanese, kanji are used to write certain words or parts of words (usually such as , adjective word stem, and verb word stem), while are used to write inflection verb and adjective endings, phonetic complements to disambiguate readings (), particles, and miscellaneous words which have no kanji or whose kanji are considered obscure or too difficult to read or remember. are mostly used for representing onomatopoeia, gairaigo (except those borrowed from Old Chinese), the names of plants and animals (with exceptions), and for emphasis on certain words.
After the Meiji Restoration and as Japan entered an era of active exchange with foreign countries, the need for script reform in Japan began to be called for. Some scholars argued for the abolition of kanji and the writing of Japanese using only or Latin characters. However, these views were not 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 for regular use. In 1940, the Japanese Army decided on the heiki meishō yō seigen kanji hyō which limited the number of kanji that could be used for weapons names to 1,235. In 1942, the National Language Council announced the hyōjun kanji-hyō with a total 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 orthography reforms, to help children learn and to simplify kanji use 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 given simplified , called shinjitai. Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged.
These are simply guidelines, so many characters outside these standards are still widely known and commonly used; these are known as hyōgaiji.
Gaiji 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 represent an external character will not be consistent from one computer or operating system to another.
Gaiji 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 previously allocated to gaiji, making them completely unusable. Most desktop and mobile systems have moved to Unicode negating the need for for most users. Historically, gaiji were used by Japanese mobile service providers for emoji.
Unicode allows for optional encoding of gaiji in private use areas, while Adobe's SING (Smart INdependent Glyphlets).. technology allows the creation of customized gaiji.
The Text Encoding Initiative uses a element to encode any non-standard character or glyph, including gaiji. The g stands for gaiji..
A list of 2,136 kanji is regarded as necessary for functional literacy in Japanese. Approximately a thousand more characters are commonly used and readily understood by the majority in Japan and a few thousand more find occasional use, particularly in specialized fields of study but those may be obscure to most out of context. A total of 13,108 characters can be encoded in various Japanese Industrial Standards for kanji.
Readings are categorized as either literally "meaning reading", native Japanese, or literally "sound reading", borrowed from Chinese. Most kanji have at least a single reading of each category, though some have only one, such as "chrysanthemum", an -reading or "sardine", a -reading; Japanese-coined kanji () often only have readings.
Some common kanji have ten or more possible readings; the most complex common example is 生, which is read as , , , , , , , , , , , and , totaling eight basic readings (the first two are , while the rest are ), or 12 if related verbs are counted as distinct.
The analogous phenomenon occurs to a much lesser degree in Chinese varieties, where there are literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters—borrowed readings and native readings. In Chinese these borrowed readings and native readings are etymologically related, since they are between Chinese varieties (which are related), not from Chinese to Japanese (which are not related). They thus form doublets and are generally similar, analogous to different , reflecting different stages of Chinese borrowings into Japanese.
often use mixed readings. For instance, the city of [[Sapporo]] (サッポロ), whose name derives from the [[Ainu language]] and has no meaning in Japanese, is written with the compound sapporo (which includes as if it were a purely compound).
are other readings assigned to a character instead of its standard readings. An example is reading (meaning "cold") as ("winter") rather than the standard readings or , and instead of the usual spelling for of . Another example is using () with the reading ("tobacco") rather than the otherwise-expected readings of or . Some of these, such as for , have become [[lexicalized]], but in many cases this kind of use is typically non-standard and employed in specific contexts by individual writers. Aided with , could be used to convey complex literary or poetic effect (especially if the readings contradict the kanji), or clarification if the referent may not be obvious.
are when the standard kanji for a word are related to the meaning, but not the sound. The word is pronounced as a whole, not corresponding to sounds of individual kanji. For example, ("this morning") is . This word is not read as , the expected of the characters, and only infrequently as , the of the characters. The most common reading is , a native bisyllabic Japanese word that may be seen as a single [[morpheme]], or as a compound of (“this”, as in , the older reading for , “today”), and , “morning”. Likewise, ("today") is also , usually read with the native reading ; its , , does occur in certain words and expressions, especially in the broader sense "nowadays" or "current", such as ("present-day"), although in the phrase ("good day"), is typically spelled wholly with rather than with the kanji .
are primarily used for some native Japanese words, such as Yamato or , the name of the dominant ethnic group of Japan, a former Japanese province as well as ancient name for Japan), and for some old borrowings, such as (, literally "willow leaf fish") from Ainu, (, literally “smoke grass”) from Portuguese, or (, literally “wheat alcohol”) from Dutch, especially if the word was borrowed before the [[Meiji period]]. Words whose kanji are are often usually written as (if native), or (if borrowed); some old borrowed words are also written as , especially Portuguese loanwords such as () from Portuguese "" (English "card") or () from Portuguese "" (English “times, season”), as well as ().
Sometimes, can even have more kanji than there are syllables, examples being (, “woodpecker”), (, “silver berry, oleaster”), and (, a surname). This phenomenon is observed in animal names that are shortened and used as suffixes for zoological compound names, for example when , normally read as , is shortened to in , although zoological names are commonly spelled with katakana rather than with kanji. Outside zoology, this type of shortening only occurs on a handful of words, for example , or the historical male name suffix , which was shortened from the word .
The kanji compound for is often idiosyncratic and created for the word, and there is no corresponding Chinese word with that spelling. In other cases, a kanji compound for an existing Chinese word is reused, where the Chinese word and may or may not be used in Japanese. For example, ("reindeer") is for , from Ainu, but the reading of is also used. In some cases, Japanese coinages have subsequently been Wasei-kango, such as (, "monkfish").
The underlying word for is a native Japanese word or foreign borrowing, which either does not have an existing kanji spelling (either or ) or for which a new kanji spelling is produced. Most often the word is a noun, which may be a simple noun (not a compound or derived from a verb), or may be a verb form or a fusional pronunciation. For example, the word (, "sumo") is originally from the verb (, “to vie, to compete”), while (, "today") is fusional (from older , "this" + , "day").
In rare cases, is also applied to inflectional words (verbs and adjectives), in which case there is frequently a corresponding Chinese word. The most common example of an inflectional is the adjective (, “cute”), originally ; the word is used in Chinese language, but the corresponding is not used in Japanese. By contrast, "appropriate" can be either (, as ) or (, as ). Which reading to use can be discerned by the presence or absence of the ending (). A common example of a verb with is (, “to spread, to be in vogue”), corresponding to (). A sample deverbal (noun derived from a verb form) is (, "extortion"), from (, “to extort”), spelling from (, "extortion"). Note that there are also compound verbs and, less commonly, compound adjectives, and while these may have multiple kanji without intervening characters, they are read using the usual . Examples include (, "interesting", literally "face + white") and (, "sly", "cunning, crafty + clever, smart").
Typographically, the for are often written so they are centered across the entire word, or for inflectional words over the entire root—corresponding to the reading being related to the entire word—rather than each part of the word being centered over its corresponding character, as is often done for the usual phono-semantic readings.
Broadly speaking, can be considered a form of , though in narrow usage, "" refers specifically to using characters for sound and not meaning (sound-spelling), whereas "" refers to using characters for their meaning and not sound (meaning-spelling). Many (established meaning-spellings) began as (improvised meaning-spellings). Occasionally, a single word will have many such kanji spellings. An extreme example is Lesser Cuckoo]], which may be spelt in many ways, including , , , , , , , ,, , and —many of these variant spellings are particular to haiku poems.
A single kanji followed by ( forming part of a word)—such as the inflectable suffixes forming native verbs and adjectives like 赤い ( akai; red) and 見る ( miru; to see)— always indicates . can indicate which to use, as in () versus (), both meaning "(to) eat", but this is not always sufficient, as in , which may be read as or , both meaning "(to) open".
Kanji compounds (), especially yojijukugo, usually, but not always, use , usually (but not always) . In detoxification, anti-poison, 解 is read with its kan-on reading instead of its more common go-on reading, . Exceptions are common— (; information), for example, is go-kan. (; beef) and (; mutton) have readings, but (; pork) and (; poultry) have readings. Examples of fully kun'yomi compounds include (; letter), (; parasol), and the infamous (; divine wind). Some kun'yomi compounds have non-inflective , such as (; Chinese-style fried chicken) and (); many can also be written with the omitted.
Kanji in isolation are typically read using their ; exceptions include the on'yomi (; love), (), and (; mark, dot). Most of these on'yomi cases involve kanji that have no . For kanji with multiple common isolated readings, such as , which may be read as (gold) or (money, metal), only context can determine the intended reading.
The isolated kanji versus compound distinction gives words for similar concepts completely different pronunciations. Alone, (north) and (east) use the and , but (northeast), uses the . Inconsistencies also occur between compounds; is read as in (; teacher) but as in (; one's whole life) (both on'yomi).
Multiple readings have given rise to a number of , in some cases having different meanings depending on how they are read. One example is , which can be read in three different ways: (skilled), (upper part), or (stage left/house right). In addition, has the reading (skilled). More subtly, has three different readings, all meaning "tomorrow": (casual), (polite), and (formal).
Conversely, some terms are homophonous but not homographic, and thus ambiguous in speech but not in writing. To remedy this, alternate readings may be used for confusable words. For example, (privately established, esp. school) and (municipal) are both normally pronounced ; in speech these may be distinguished by the alternative pronunciations and . More informally, in legal jargon (preamble) and (full text) are both pronounced , so may be pronounced for clarity, as in "Have you memorized the preamble not of the constitution?". As in these examples, this is primarily done using a for one character in a normally term.
| 懈怠 ("negligence") | ||
| 競売 ("auction") | ||
| 兄弟姉妹 ("siblings") | ||
| 境界 ("metes and bounds") | ||
| 競落 ("acquisition at an auction") | ||
| 遺言 ("will") | ||
| 図画 ("imagery") Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary |
There are also cases where the words are technically heterophones, but they have similar meanings and pronunciations, therefore liable to mishearing and misunderstanding.
| extra="assistant engineer", on, alternatively , jūbako | extra="engineer", on |
| extra="chief", on, alternatively , yutō Digital Daijisen | extra="mayor", on |
Japanese family names are also usually read with : , , . Japanese often have very irregular readings. Although they are not typically considered or , they often contain mixtures of , and , such as , . Being chosen at the discretion of the parents, the readings of given names do not follow any set rules, and it is impossible to know with certainty how to read a person's name without independent verification. Parents can be quite creative, and rumors abound of children called ("Earth") and ("Angel"); neither are common names, and have normal readings and respectively. Some common Japanese names can be written in multiple ways, e.g., Akira can be written as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and many other characters and kanji combinations not listed, Satoshi can be written as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , etc., and Haruka can be written as , , , , , , , , and several other possibilities. Common patterns do exist, however, allowing experienced readers to make a good guess for most names. To alleviate any confusion on how to pronounce the names of other Japanese people, most official Japanese documents require Japanese to write their names in both and kanji.
Chinese place names and Chinese personal names appearing in Japanese texts, if spelled in kanji, are almost invariably read with . Especially for older and well-known names, the resulting Japanese pronunciation may differ widely from that used by modern Chinese speakers. For example, Mao Zedong's name is pronounced as Mō Takutō in Japanese, and the name of the legendary Monkey King, Sun Wukong, is pronounced () in Japanese.
Today, Chinese names that are not well known in Japan are often spelled in instead, in a form much more closely approximating the native Chinese pronunciation. Alternatively, they may be written in kanji with . Many such cities have names that come from non- like Mongolian or Manchu language. Examples of such not-well-known Chinese names include:
| Harbin | ハルビン | ||
| Ürümqi | ウルムチ | ||
| Qiqihar | チチハル | ||
| Lhasa | ラサ |
| Hong Kong | / | ホンコン | |||||
| Macao/Macau | / / | / | マカオ | ||||
| Shanghai | / / | シャンハイ | |||||
| Beijing/Peking | ペキン | ||||||
| Nanjing/Nanking | ナンキン | ||||||
| Taipei | タイペイ / タイホク | / | |||||
| Kaohsiung | / | / | / / | / | / | カオシュン / タカオ | / |
Notes:
In some cases the same kanji can appear in a given word with different readings. Normally this occurs when a character is duplicated and the reading of the second character has voicing (), as in 人人 "people" (more often written with the iteration mark as ), but in rare cases the readings can be unrelated, as in "hop around", more often written 飛び跳ねる.
Likewise, the process of character simplification in mainland China since the 1950s has resulted in the fact that Japanese speakers who have not studied Chinese may not recognize some simplified characters.
The term kokuji may also refer to Chinese characters coined in other (non-Chinese) countries; the corresponding phenomenon in Korea is called (; national characters); there are however far fewer Korean-coined characters than Japanese-coined ones. Other languages using the Chinese family of scripts sometimes have far more extensive systems of native characters, most significantly Vietnamese chữ Nôm, which comprises over 20,000 characters used throughout traditional Vietnamese writing, and Zhuang languages sawndip, which comprises over 10,000 characters, which are still in use.
| rattan, cane, vine | ||||
| rinse, minor river (Cantonese) | ||||
| Toona spp. | ||||
| catfish (rare, usually written 鯰) | ||||
| blossom | smile (rare, usually written ) |
(Mandarin: ) characters are [[pictograph]]ic sketches of the object they represent. For example, is an eye, while is a tree. The current forms of the characters are very different from the originals, though their representations are more clear in oracle bone script and [[seal script]]. These pictographic characters make up only a small fraction of modern characters.
(Mandarin: ) characters are [[ideograph]]s, often called "simple ideographs" or "simple indicatives" to distinguish them and tell the difference from compound ideographs (below). They are usually simple graphically and represent an abstract concept such as "up" or "above" and "down" or "below". These make up a tiny fraction of modern characters.
(Mandarin: ) characters are compound ideographs, often called "compound indicatives", "associative compounds", or just "ideographs". These are usually a combination of pictographs that combine semantically to present an overall meaning. An example of this type is (rest) from (person radical) and (tree). Another is the (mountain pass) made from (mountain), (up) and (down). These make up a tiny fraction of modern characters.
(Mandarin: ) characters are phono-semantic or radical-phonetic compounds, sometimes called "semantic-phonetic", "semasio-phonetic", or "phonetic-ideographic" characters, are by far the largest category, making up about 90% of the characters in the standard lists; however, some of the most frequently used kanji belong to one of the three groups mentioned above, so will usually make up less than 90% of the characters in a text. Typically they are made up of two components, one of which (most commonly, but by no means always, the left or top element) suggests the general category of the meaning or semantic context, and the other (most commonly the right or bottom element) approximates the pronunciation. The pronunciation relates to the original Chinese, and may now only be distantly detectable in the modern Japanese of the kanji; it generally has no relation at all to . The same is true of the semantic context, which may have changed over the centuries or in the transition from Chinese to Japanese. As a result, it is a common error in folk etymology to fail to recognize a phono-semantic compound, typically instead inventing a compound-indicative explanation.
(Mandarin: ) characters have variously been called "derivative characters", "derivative [[cognate]]s", or translated as "mutually explanatory" or "mutually synonymous" characters; this is the most problematic of the six categories, as it is vaguely defined. It may refer to kanji where the meaning or application has become extended. For example, is used for 'music' and 'comfort, ease', with different pronunciations in Chinese reflected in the two different , "music" and "pleasure".
(Mandarin: ) are [[rebus]]es, sometimes called "phonetic loans". The etymology of the characters follows one of the patterns above, but the present-day meaning is completely unrelated to this. A character was appropriated to represent a similar-sounding word. For example, in ancient Chinese was originally a pictograph for "wheat". Its syllable was homophonous with the verb meaning "to come", and the character is used for that verb as a result, without any embellishing "meaning" element attached. The character for wheat , originally meant "to come", being a having 'foot' at the bottom for its meaning part and "wheat" at the top for sound. The two characters swapped meaning, so today the more common word has the simpler character. This borrowing of sounds has a very long history.
Another abbreviated symbol is , in appearance a small , but actually a simplified version of the kanji , a general counter. It is pronounced when used to indicate quantity (such as 六ヶ月, "six months") or if used as a genitive (as in 関ヶ原 "Sekigahara").
The way how these symbols may be produced on a computer depends on the operating system. In macOS, typing will reveal the symbol as well as , and . To produce , type . Under Windows, typing will reveal some of these symbols, while in Google IME, may be used.
Other kanji sorting methods, such as the SKIP system, have been devised by various authors.
Modern general-purpose Japanese dictionaries (as opposed to specifically character dictionaries) generally collate all entries, including words written using kanji, according to their representations (reflecting the way they are pronounced). The ordering of is normally used for this purpose.
Students studying Japanese as a foreign language are often required by a curriculum to acquire kanji without having first learned the vocabulary associated with them. Strategies for these learners vary from copying-based methods to mnemonic-based methods such as those used in James Heisig's series Remembering the Kanji. Other textbooks use methods based on the etymology of the characters, such as Mathias and Habein's The Complete Guide to Everyday Kanji and Henshall's A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters. Pictorial , as in the text Kanji Pict-o-graphix by Michael Rowley, are also seen.
The Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation provides the ( ; "Test of Japanese Kanji Aptitude"), which tests the ability to read and write kanji. The highest level of the tests about six thousand kanji.
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