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smaller than the Chinese characters making up most of the text so as to help the
reader understand it as Japanese. In broad terms, it was this sort of development that
marked the very beginning of what was to evolve as the mixed kanji-kana writing
used in Japan today.
The Modern Period
When Japan began actively to adopt various aspects of Western culture and modernize
from the latter part of the nineteenth century onwards, some intellectuals expressed
feelings of doubt over the very complicated way Japanese was written compared
with the marvellous simplicity of the Roman alphabet which allowed any and
every thought to be put in writing by means of no more than several dozen letters.
Eventually, though, such doubts were set aside, and the Japanese persevered with a
hugely intricate writing system which involved not only thousands of characters in
their traditional, often very complicated, shapes, but also a very involved historical
system of kana spellings. This changed after the end of the Pacific War in 1945,
though, when Japanese society experienced many radical changes. Amongst them
was script simplification. Starting in 1946, script reforms were carried out, promoting
the use of a restricted character set of 1850 and a far simpler system of kana usage
based on modern pronunciation.
Broadly speaking, the script reforms put into effect from the late 1940s have been
maintained down to the present, though with a degree of easing. For example, the
number of general-use characters has been increased, first from 1850 to 1945 (in
1981) and then to 2136 (in 2010). Developments in computer technology from the
1970s onwards have tended to make it easier to write Japanese text using a larger
character set, as passive confirmation of characters by the writer by selecting from a
list of options on a computer screen is easier than active recall from memory when
writing by hand. Computer technology has also greatly assisted the printing of Japanese
text, both privately by individuals and commercially.
As should be clear from the above, Chinese characters have been an integral part
of Japanese culture for a period of about fifteen hundred years, and their importance
is undiminished today. Many characters are used in senses different from in Chinese,
and some have been simplified in shape in a way different from the simplified
equivalents in PRC Chinese texts. For these reasons, while the Japanese word kanji
() is commonly and validly translated as ‘Chinese characters’, in the context of
Japanese it is equally valid to render it instead as ‘Japanese characters’, as in the title
to this book.
Note: readers wanting more details are referred to CS2000 (see Bibliography).
The Japanese Writing System: A Brief Sketch 29