Category: Japanese Language

Japanese Government-mandated Orthography Chaos

Japan was considerably later than numerous other civilizations in acquiring a written language. When it did, it was basically by adopting Chinese characters to the task of writing Japanese. Those characters are still used, and promoters of schemes to replace them totally with phonetic writing have universally failed. They’re here to stay.

Before the early 20th century, the use of kanji logograms (not ideograms, a long-standing misconception I will write about shortly) in Japan was without much government interference or guidance. It was a lawless land of kanji logograms.

Then came the kanjicrats, with numerous well-meaning attempts to regulate or guide use of kanji, most of which did not reflect—and was ineffective in controlling—the way kanji were used in real life. Some of the highlights of the kanji evolution in Japan are as follows.

1923Joyo Kanji Table May 9
1962 characters, 154 abbreviated characters
1931147 characters removed from and 45 characters added to the Joyo Kanji Table, making it 1858 characters.
November 16, 1946Toyo Kanji Table established by cabinet order (Cabinet Notification/Order)
(1) 1850 characters for use in statutes, public documents, newspapers, and general society)
(2) Proper nouns such as personal names and place names are exceptions, considered separately because of legal and other reasons.
February 16 1948Toyo Kanji onyomi and kunyomi Tables and Toyo Kanji Separate Table established (Cabinet Notification/Order)
(1) Generated to indicate the onyomi and kunyomi to be used going forward for each of the characters in the Toyo Kanji table.
(2) 881 characters (so-called educational characters) of the Toyo Kanji table listed as necessary in education during compulsory education to enable reading and writing.
April 28, 1949Toyo Kanji Character Form Table (Cabinet Notification/Order)
(1) Created to show the standard form of kanji in the Toyo Kanji table
(2) To facilitate and make accurate the reading and writing of characters in the table, organization of simplified characters and unification as much as possible in accordance with printed character forms.
May 25, 1961Personal Name Character Table (Cabinet Notification/Order)
92 Kanji characters indicated for use in proper nouns.
July 30, 1976Added Personal Name Character Table (Cabinet Notification/Order)
28 Characters added for use in personal names.
October 1, 1981Joyo Kanji Table (Cabinet Notification/Order)
(1) 95 Characters added to the Toyo Kanji table for use in statutes, public documents, newspapers, magazines, broadcasting, and daily life in writing Japanese, making the character count 1945
(2) Place names and personal names are treated as exceptions.
(3) The Joyo Kanji list of characters should be used as a reference in selecting names for children.
December 8, 2000(Response from the National Language Council)
Non-listed character list of characters for printing established (1022 characters) as standard printing character forms. JIS standard JIS X 0213 modified accordingly.
Subsequent Addition of Characters for Personal Names
198154 characters added.
February 2004Several characters added, making the total number of characters for personal names became 290.
September 27, 2004-9-27488 characters added + 205 characters added (*) Of the 205 characters, 195 are old forms of Joyo Kanji, 10 are the old forms of characters for personal names.
This makes the current number of personal name kanji is 290 + 488 + 205, for a total of 983.
As of 2010, the list of Joyo Kanji includes 2136 characters.

All of that said, while the print and broadcast media (particularly NHK) are careful not to use unlisted characters, there are numerous instances of Japanese writers ignoring the above guidelines. Even Japanese patent specifications—arguably public documents—provide numerous examples of characters not included in the current Joyo Kanji list of 2136 characters. And, of course, most literate Japanese, which includes a higher portion of the population than in cultures with ostensibly “easier” languages, are able to read and use many characters beyond the official lists.

Another aspect of kanji that I have noticed is that, while many anglophones comment that kanji are so difficult that young students are unduly burdened, I have almost never heard such comments from native Japanese speakers, outside of educators. Kanji are just accepted by the general public, like the air around us, with no complaints heard or reforms demanded, except perhaps from lingering kanjicrats in government agencies.

Huh? Where’s the Hospital?

Having a brain that still functions well enough and a ready stock of real-world experiences, I am not a frequent flier to AI destinations, but a confusion that happened (to someone else) the other day prompted me to see if ChatGPT would have been any less confused than something I witnessed in the real world.

I was sitting waiting for a bus at the みなと赤十字病院入口 (Minato Red Cross Hospital Entrance) bus stop, when I saw a clearly confused young foreign woman looking alternately at her mobile phone and the name of the bus stop at which she had just gotten off a bus.

Seeing her confusion and that she was on crutches, I asked her where she was looking to go.

She pointed to the name of the bus stop and was wondering why she couldn’t see the hospital. Where were they hiding what was surely a substantial medical facility? The answer to the mystery lies in the way bus stops are sometimes named, and in the fact that other buses make a stop at a bus stop named みなと赤十字病院, without the 入口, which means entrance and is located right at the entrance to the hospital. Why does is a bus stop named XYZ Entrance not at the entrance and one without “Entrance” at the actual entrance to XYZ?

The Entrance in the bus stop name refers to it being at the entrance to the road leading to the hospital and shared by at least three bus routes that do not go to the hospital entrance itself.

Would ChatGPT, in all it’s wisdom, have solved this problem before forcing someone on crutches to wait for yet another bus or walk what would be a considerable and perhaps annoying distance on crutches?

My prompt to ChatGPT:

There is a bus stop in Yokohama with the name 赤十字病院入口. Where is that bus stop?

Here’s what it came back with:

The bus stop 赤十字病院入口 (正確には「みなと赤十字病院入口」) is located in Yokohama’s Naka Ward, serving the Yokohama Minato Red Cross Hospital.

[Wow, it could give me the formal name of the hospital !]

Here’s the detailed information:

  • Address: 神奈川県横浜市中区新山下3丁目15 (or nearby 3-1–6)

[I guess that’s right, but didn’t check]

  • Coordinates: approximately 35.436557, 139.661561.

[Who cares, unless you are planning on dropping a hospital-buster bomb on the place?]

  • It’s situated along the bus routes that connect Yokohama / Sakuragicho / Motomachi-Chukagai stations to the hospital. [Correct, except that there is no Motomachi-Chukagai bus stop on some of the buses stopping where this occurred.] The stop is right by the hospital entrance. [Wrong. It was fooled just like the young lady on crutches. It’s nowhere near being “right by the hospital entrance.”]

ChatGPT proved that, just as a human without knowledge or experience regarding how bus stops could be named, it could mistake the name as being literally descriptive of its location.

Of course, I suspected that it would be fooled and knew the reason for the confusion.

People in the neighborhood who might frequent the hospital and have more general real-world experience riding buses (something that ChatGPT does not have and never will have) realize that the hospital entrance bus stop is not at the hospital entrance. The hospital stop is at the hospital, and the hospital entrance stop is about a five-minute walk away.

Most of them probably sense that bus stop as being right at the entrance to a  Manchinro shop, at which I frequently buy shumai, which is what I had just done when I encountered the confused visitor.