Background
The following forms were established as a result of the post-war character reforms. However, they were not completely created anew, as many were based on widely used handwritten abbreviations (''Unofficial simplifications
The simplification in shinjitai were only officially applied to characters in the Tōyō and Jōyō Kanji Lists, with the kyūjitai forms remaining the official forms of . For example, the character (''KYO'', ''agaru'', ''ageru''; raise n example was simplified as , but the character (''keyaki'';Methods of simplifying Kanji
Adoption of grass script forms
Cursive script (also known as grass script) and semi-cursive script forms of kanji were adopted as shinjitai. Examples include: * * * (religion/ceremony radical) → *Standardization and unification of character forms
Characters in which there were two or more variants were standardized under one form. The character (''TŌ'', ''shima''; island) also had the variant forms (still seen in proper names) and , but only the form became standard. The 辶 radical was previously printed with two dots (as in the hyōgaiji ) but was written with one (as in ), so the written form with one dot became standard. The upper 丷 portion of the characters and was previously printed as 八 and written 丷 (as in the aforementioned examples), but the old printed form is still seen in the hyōgaiji characters and . The character (''SEI'', ''SHŌ'', ''ao''; blue) was once printed as but written as , so the written form became standard; the old printed form is still found in the standard form in hyōgaiji characters such as and , but is used in some fonts.Change of character indicating ''On'' reading
Characters of the ''keisei moji'' () group each contain a semantic component and a phonetic component. A choice was made to replace the phonetic parts with homophones which had fewer strokes. For example, was changed to , because and were homophones. Other simplifications of this method include . There are also colloquial handwritten simplifications (otherwise known asAdoption of variant characters
In some cases a standard character was replaced by a variant character that neither is a graphical variant nor shares an On reading, but had a historical basis for standardisation. Examples include and , replacing and respectively. In both cases the variant character had a different meaning and reading but was adopted due to its lower stroke count anyway.Removal of components
Some kanji were simplified by removing entire components. For example, *The portion of was removed to become * * * * * *Adding a stroke
In five basic cases and six derivations for a total of eleven cases, kanji were modified by adding a stroke, thereby rendering the composition more regular: * (, →) – the bottom component becomes the common . However, the character 捗 was not modified (Compare with the section "''Inconsistencies''"). * – similarly * () – the bottom becomes * () – the top right becomes * – formerly the middle stroke was part of the lower left stroke, now these are separate, so the lower two strokes form the common * – formerly the small stroke at upper left of was part of the vertical stroke in , but now it is a separate stroke.Inconsistencies
Simplification was not carried out uniformly. Firstly, only a select group of characters (the common jōyō kanji) was simplified, with characters outside this group (the hyōgaiji) generally retaining their earlier form. For example, and (with the right-side element in the latter two not being identical, but merely graphically similar) were simplified as , and , respectively, but the hyōgaiji and which contain the same element (), were kept in use in their unsimplified variants. Secondly, even when a simplification was done in some characters within this group, the analogous simplification was not applied to all characters. For instance, the character , meaning "dragon", was simplified in isolation and in some compound characters, but not others. The character itself was simplified to , as was the compound character ("waterfall") → ; however, it was ''not'' simplified in the characters ("attack") and ("basket"), although an extended shinjitai variant, , exists for the latter, and is used in practice rather often over the official variant, for instance in vs. ("gauntlet"). Conversely, the character ("pierce") was not simplified, nor was the compound character ("accustomed"), but in the other compound character it was simplified, resulting in ("truth"). Similarly, ("graduate") has been kept unsimplified in isolation, but in compounds has been simplified to , such as to "drunk"; has been simplified to in some characters, such as to ("transmit"), and to ("revolve"), but only to ("exclusive") in isolation. The latter may at first glance appear in common jōyō kanji such as ("thin") or ("doctor"), but the component in those is actually , which is not used in isolation in Japanese. The latest 2010 jōyō kanji reform has added additional inconsistencies in this regard as in some instances radicals that were previously uniformly simplified across the jōyō set now first appeared in their traditional variants in some of the new jōyō characters; contrary to prior practice no new simplifications of characters have been carried out, likely in consideration of established JIS character set use spanning decades at this point. Compare → ("drink") to 2010 jōyō ("fodder, bait"), or → ("coin") to 2010 jōyō ("label"). For the latter an analogically simplified character does exist, but was likely ignored due to having no history of use in Japanese character sets. On the other hand, former extended shinjitai ("luster") has been added in favor of . Nevertheless, the guidelines published by the Japanese government explicitly permit simplification in handwriting, and do not object to use of alternate characters in electronic text.http://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/joho/joho/kijun/naikaku/pdf/joyokanjihyo_20101130.pdfSimplifications in Jōyō Kanji and Jinmeiyō Kanji
In the 2,136 Jōyō Kanji, there are 364 pairs of simplified and traditional characters. Note that the kanji 弁 is used to simplify three different traditional kanji (辨, 瓣, and 辯). Of these 364 traditional characters, 212 are still used as Jinmeiyō Kanji in names. The Jinmeiyō Kanji List also includes 631 kanji that are not elements of the Jōyō Kanji List; 18 of them have a variant. For a list of traditional and modern forms of Jōyō Kanji and Jinmeiyō Kanji, see Kyūjitai. Some of the traditional kanji are not included in the Japanese font of Windows XP/2000, and only rectangles are shown. Downloading the Meiryo font from the Microsoft website (VistaFont_JPN.EXE) and installing it will solve this problem.Traditional characters that may cause problems displaying
Note that within the Jōyō Kanji there are 62 characters whose old forms may cause problems displaying: Kyōiku Kanji (26): * Grade 2 (2 kanji): * Grade 3 (8 kanji): * Grade 4 (6 kanji): * Grade 5 (1 kanji): * Grade 6 (9 kanji): Secondary-School Kanji (36): * Secondary School (36 kanji): These characters are Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs for which the old form (kyūjitai) and the new form (shinjitai) have been unified under the Unicode standard. Although the old and new forms are distinguished under the JIS X 0213 standard, the old forms map to Unicode CJK Compatibility Ideographs which are considered by Unicode to be canonically equivalent to the new forms and may not be distinguished by user agents. Therefore, depending on the user environment, it may not be possible to see the distinction between old and new forms of the characters. In particular, all Unicode normalization methods merge the old characters with the new ones.Controversies
Like one of the controversial aspects of simplified Chinese, some shinjitai were originally separate characters with different meanings. For example, the kanji (''GEI''; performance, accomplishment) was simplified to , but was originally a separate character read with the On reading ''UN''. Many of the original characters which have become merged are no longer used in modern Japanese: for example, (''YO, arakaji(me)''; in advance) and (''YO, ama(ri)''; excess) were merged with and , respectively, both archaic kanji for the first person pronoun "I". However, poses a problem, in that Japan's first public library, Untei () (built during theDifferences in simplification between Chinese and Japanese
Mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan simplified their writing systems independently from each other. After World War II, poor relations prevented cooperation between the two nations. Traditional Chinese characters are still officially used in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, South Korea (as a supplement toSee also
* *References
External links
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