Shinjitai


are the simplified forms of kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in shinjitai are also found in Simplified Chinese characters, but shinjitai is generally not as extensive in the scope of its modification.
Shinjitai were created by reducing the number of strokes in kyūjitai, unsimplified kanji usually the same as Traditional Chinese characters, also called. This simplification was achieved through a process of either replacing the onpu indicating the On reading with another onpu of the same On reading with fewer strokes, or replacing a complex component of a character with a simpler one.
There have been a few stages of simplifications made since the 1950s, but the only changes that became official were the changes in the Jōyō Kanji List in 1981 and 2010.

Background

The following forms were established as a result of the postwar character reforms. However, they were not completely created anew, as many were based on widely used handwritten abbreviations from the prewar era. Due to the complexity of kanji, many abbreviations were used in handwriting, whose status rose to become official characters in the post-war reforms. Attention was paid to the aesthetic balance of the characters in their new form.
In almost all cases, characters in the new standard have fewer strokes than old forms, though in a few cases they have the same number, and in a few other cases they have one more stroke. The most radical simplification was 廳→庁, removing 20 strokes. A complete list by stroke count reduction can be found at: ]

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 Hyōgaiji. For example, the character 擧 was simplified as 挙, but the character 欅 which also contained 擧, remained unsimplified due to its status as a Hyōgaiji.
Despite this, simplified forms of hyōgaiji do exist in Japanese character sets, and are referred to as extended shinjitai. However, they are to be seen as unofficial, a position reiterated in the National Language Council's 2000 report on Characters Not Listed in the Jōyō Kanji Table.
The Asahi Shimbun newspaper is thorough in its simplification of hyōgaiji, and its in-house simplifications are called Asahi characters.
For example, 痙攣 is simplified following the model of 經→経 and 戀→恋. This is also said to have been done because in the age of typewriter-based printing, more complicated kanji could not be clearly printed.
The Japanese Industrial Standards contain numerous simplified forms of Kanji following the model of the shinjitai simplifications, such as 﨔 ; many of these are included in Unicode, but are not present in most kanji character sets.
Ryakuji for handwriting use, such as the abbreviations for 門 and 第 are not a part of the shinjitai reforms and therefore do not carry official status.

Methods of simplifying Kanji

Adoption of grass script forms

and semi-cursive script forms of kanji were adopted as shinjitai. Examples include:
Characters in which there were two or more variants were standardized under one form. The character 島 also had the variant forms 嶋 and 嶌, but only the 島 form became standard. The 辶 radical was previously printed with two dots but was written with one, so the written form with one dot became standard. The upper 丷 portion of the characters 半, 尊, and 平 was previously printed as 八 and written 丷, but the old printed form is still seen in the hyōgaiji characters 絆 and 鮃. The character 青 was once printed as 靑 but written as 青, so the written form became standard; the old printed form is still found in the standard form in hyōgaiji characters such as 鯖 and 蜻, but 青 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, 圍 was changed to 囲, because 韋 and 井 were homophones.
Other simplifications of this method include 竊→窃, 廳→庁, 擔→担. There are also colloquial handwritten simplifications based on this model, in which various non-kanji symbols are used as onpu, for example 魔 , 慶 , 藤 , and 機 .

Adoption of variant character

In some cases a standard character was replaced by a variant character that is neither a graphical variant nor shares an On reading, but had historical basis for standardisation. Examples include 證 → 証 and 燈 → 灯, replacing 登 → 正 and 登 → 丁 respectively. In both cases the variant character had a different meaning and reading but was adopted due to its fewer stroke count anyway.

Removal of components

Some kanji were simplified by removing entire components. For example,
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:
Simplification was not carried out uniformly. Firstly, only a select group of characters was simplified, with characters outside this group generally retaining their earlier form. For example, wikt:賣, wikt:續 and wikt:讀 were simplified as wikt:売, wikt:続, and wikt:読, respectively, but the hyōgaiji wikt:贖, wikt:犢 and wikt:牘, 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 wikt:龍, meaning "dragon", was simplified in isolation and in some compound characters, but not others. The character itself was simplified to wikt:竜, as was the compound character wikt:瀧 → wikt:滝; however, it was not simplified in the characters 襲 and 籠, although an extended shinjitai variant, 篭, exists for the latter, and is used in practice rather often over the official variant, for instance in 篭手 vs. 籠手.
Conversely, the character wikt:貫 was not simplified, nor was the compound character wikt:慣, but in the other compound character wikt:實 it was simplified, resulting in wikt:実.
Similarly, 卒 has been kept unsimplified in isolation, but in compounds has been simplified to 卆, such as 醉 to 酔 "drunk"; 專 has been simplified to 云 in some characters, such as 傳 to 伝, and 轉 to 転, but only to 専 in isolation. The latter may at first glance appear in common jōyō kanji such as 薄 or 博, but the component in those is actually 尃, 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 飮 → 飲 to 2010 jōyō 餌, or 錢 → 銭 to 2010 jōyō 箋. For the latter an analogically simplified 䇳 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 艶 has been added in favor of 艷.
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.

Simplifications 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. 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 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 :
Secondary-School Kanji :
These characters are Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs for which the old form and the new form 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 藝 was simplified to 芸, but 芸 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, 豫 and 餘 were merged with 予 and 余, respectively, both archaic kanji for the first person pronoun "I". However, 芸 poses a problem, in that Japan's first public library, Untei uses this character. This character also has significance in classical Japanese literature, and Japanese history books have had to distinguish between the two by writing UN using the old form of the 艹 radical,.

Differences in simplification between Chinese and Japanese

The People's Republic of China 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, and by many overseas Chinese.
In Chinese, many more characters were simplified than in Japanese; some characters were simplified only in the one language, but not in the other; other characters were simplified in the same way in both languages, others in different ways. This means that those who want to learn the writing systems of both Chinese and Japanese must sometimes learn three different variations of one character: traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, and modern Japanese.
traditional Chinesesimplified Chinesemodern Japanese
No simplification in either language悲悲悲
Same simplification in both languages獻献献
Simplified in Chinese only緊紧緊
Simplified in Japanese only惠惠恵
Different simplifications in Chinese and Japanese棧栈桟
Chinese simplification more drastic驅驱駆

Glyph conversion