(or variant form) is used primarily to refer to an alternative shape for a particular character, e.g. 髙 is an alternative shape for 高 132 ‘tall, high’. Such variants are described in relation to a norm such as the Kangxi zidian or the Jōyō kanji list of 2010. What constitutes a variant can differ according to the period and the country or jurisdiction, and so what is presented as the norm in terms of character shape in Kangxi zidian often differs from the norm in the 2010 Jōyō kanji list. ‘Variant’ is also sometimes used in this book to refer to the alternative shape(s) of a determinative when occurring as an element in a compound graph, e.g. 火 8 ‘fire’ changes in shape to 灬 in 煮 1431 ‘boil, cook’.
Limitations of This Book
This book does not seek to be a comprehensive dictionary of characters as used in Japanese: its scope is limited in principle to the 2,136 characters of the Revised General Character (Kaitei Jōyō kanji) List officially adopted in Japan in 2010, though in the process of explaining the etymologies for that list many other characters are analyzed for the benefit of those readers looking for greater detail. Nor does it deal with the now relatively minor irregularities of kana spelling in the modern kana spellings. Readers who are looking for model shapes as a guide for everyday writing practice and other information such as stroke order and stroke count should refer to A Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese, which is another work in the Tuttle Language Library.
Christopher Seeley
Christchurch, New Zealand
December 2015
The Japanese Writing System:
A Brief Sketch
Beginnings
The first contact of the Japanese with writing was when items such as inscribed coins, swords, and bronze mirrors were brought over from China in the first few centuries AD. The writing that was brought over to Japan at that period was no different from the writing in China itself, i.e., Chinese characters, used to write the Chinese language. Initially, it would have been difficult for the Japanese even to understand the nature and function of writing, as this was something completely new. Over time, though, they started to become familiar with the concept of writing and subsequently learned—with the help of teachers and scribes from China and the ancient Korean kingdoms—to write in what for them was a foreign language. This, of course, was a formidable task, due partly to the very great differences between the Chinese and Japanese languages. In addition, there was the intricate nature of the Chinese script. Gradually, though, the Chinese script was adapted for Japanese. One relatively simple way of doing this was sometimes to use characters just for their sound value to write Japanese directly. So, for instance, we find the Japanese word yama ‘mountain’ represented in the eighth-century poetry anthology called Man’yōshū as 夜麻, using 夜 not for its meaning ‘night’ but purely for its on reading (i.e., Chinese-based sound value) YA, and 麻 not for its meaning ‘flax, hemp’ but similarly for its on reading MA. Many of the Man’yōshū poems are in fact written entirely in this way. Using Chinese characters in this way to write Japanese worked and was quite straightforward, but it was a rather longwinded method for texts of any length; we find this point noted in the preface to the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) of 712 AD.
Development of Kana (Japanese Syllabic Signs)
Characters employed just for their sound value often came to be written quite rapidly for economy of effort, and this led to simpler shapes. This meant, for example, that the word kuruma ‘vehicle’ might be written in a ninth century text simply as く るま rather than more elaborately as 久留末 (on readings: KU-RU-MA), and in the same way nusa ‘prayer strip’ could be written efficiently as ぬさ instead of as 奴左 (on readings: NU-SA). This, in fact, was the basic process by which the cursive-type syllabic signs called hiragana evolved. What later evolved as the other set of Japanese syllabic signs called katakana also came about for the same reason of writing efficiency, but by a substantially different process: shape simplification was achieved largely not by writing rapidly, but by omitting part of a Chinese character used for its sound value. For example, whereas the hiragana sign for ka, derived from 加 (on reading: KA), represented the whole of that character (both left and right elements) in the shape か, the katakana sign for the same syllable (ka) evolved from the same character (加) by omitting all of the right-hand side, resulting in カ. The katakana sign リ (ri) evolved in much the same way, in this case taking just the right-hand side of 利 (on reading: RI) (for further information, see kana appendix). Although at the earliest stage signs of both the hiragana and katakana type were used together, gradually there developed a tendency to use them in different contexts. Hiragana script tended to acquire an association of aesthetic refinement, and was often used for native Japanese prose and poetry, while katakana were employed in a more utilitarian and auxiliary way to indicate verb endings, grammatical function words and the like.
Beginnings of Mixed Kanji-Kana Text
Examples of texts written mostly or entirely in kana can be found dating back to about the ninth century, though it should be noted that for many centuries—unlike today—there was considerable variation in the actual shapes. However, while kana script was easy to learn and a practical tool, it lacked the enormous prestige that was associated with the Chinese script and Chinese culture in most periods of pre-modern Japan. Also, there were many Chinese terms borrowed into Japanese, and it tended to be more straightforward to use the corresponding Chinese characters to write them. For reasons such as these, especially for documents of an official nature, the Japanese often wrote not in Japanese using kana (or a combination of characters and kana), but either in Chinese, which of course meant using only Chinese characters and in the way they would be used by native Chinese writers, or—probably more frequently—in an imitation of written Chinese which was influenced to some extent by the differing structure of the Japanese language. For the Japanese, writing in Chinese or attempting to do so was surely a daunting exercise, and so it was no doubt a natural development that at some point texts should appear that had a Chinese ‘look’ but included a small number of kana-like signs, commonly written 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