![\"Screenshot](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image-9-1024x598.png\")
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\u201cI saw a tweet, apparently by a Korean person, asking: \u2018Why couldn\u2019t Japan abandon kanji while Korea could?\u2019 As you\u2019d expect, you can sense the underlying premise that \u2018doing away with kanji was progress.\u2019 You can feel the gap between how we each see kanji.\u201d<\/p>\n
The thread kicked off a lively and contentious discussion in four languages \u2013 Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English. The thread, as you might expect, is dominated by Japanese people defending the use of kanji.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d say that reflects a strongly Western, phonocentric way of thinking,\u201d the OP responded to another user who argued that the West evolved from ideograms to alphabets. \u201cMy honest impression is that it\u2019s doubtful whether that kind of \u2018development\u2019 can really be called progress.\u201d<\/p>\n
Others agreed. One user cheekily responded solely in hiragana to drive their point home: <\/p>\n
\u3079\u3064\u306b \u306b\u307b\u3093\u3054\u3067\u3082 \u3084\u308d\u3046\u3068\u304a\u3082\u3048\u3070 \u3084\u308c\u308b\u3051\u3069\u306d \u3075\u3041\u307f\u3053\u3093\u306e \u3058\u3060\u3044\u304b\u3089 \u3064\u304b\u308f\u308c\u3066\u304d\u305f \u3057\u3085\u307b\u3046\u3060\u3088 \u3082\u3058\u3059\u3046\u304c \u304a\u304a\u304f\u306a\u3063\u3066 \u3057\u304b\u3082 \u3088\u307f\u306b\u304f\u3044\u304b\u3089 \u308f\u3056\u308f\u3056 \u3084\u308b\u308a\u3086\u3046\u306f \u306a\u3044\u3093\u3060\u3051\u3069\u306d<\/p>\n
Japanese could do this too if it wanted, you know, it\u2019s a method we\u2019ve had since the Famicom era [kana-only writing]. It\u2019s just that the character count balloons and it gets hard to read, so there\u2019s no real reason to bother.<\/p>\n
A Chinese user agreed. \u201cThe advantages of characters are showing: higher information density, less confusion when coining new words\u2026with phonetic scripts, similar-sounding words become very hard to tell apart.\u201d [Note: Auto-translated text]<\/p>\n
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The week’s best content across our platforms, plus commentary, what’s hot on Japanese social media, and hot stories we’re tracking. Get our free newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n The kanji abolition movement, from Edo to Meiji<\/p>\n All of this may be true. Personally, I love the beauty and efficiency of kanji and couldn\u2019t imagine the Japanese language without them. <\/p>\n However, not everyone throughout Japanese history has agreed. Indeed, there have been some wild attempts to remove kanji from the written language. <\/p>\n The earliest attempt goes back to before the dawn of the Meiji period. Maejima Hisoka (\u524d\u5cf6\u5bc6), who would go on to found Japan Post<\/a>, was the first person to propose abolishing kanji. He submitted \u6f22\u5b57\u5fa1\u5ec3\u6b62\u4e4b\u8b70 (kanji go-haishi no gi), \u201cA Proposal to Abolish Chinese Characters,\u201d to Japan\u2019s last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu. The shogun didn\u2019t seem to care for it. <\/p>\n The debate took off again, as you might expect, in Meiji. As Japan rushed to modernize, it debated whether to reform its writing system<\/a>. Three schools of thought eventually formed: <\/p>\n Eliminate kanji and just use the kana syllabaries (the \u304b\u306a\u306e\u304f\u308f\u3044, kana no kuwai, camp), organized in the 1880s<\/p>\n Eliminate kanji and kana and use the Latin alphabet (the r\u014dmaji camp)<\/p>\n Reduce the number of kanji needed to be literate to around 2,000-3,000 (the kanji-reduction camp, led by intellectual Fukuzawa Yukichi)<\/p>\n None of these efforts, however, took off. Maejima would try to pitch abolition again at the birth of the Meiji Period, in 1872, only to be shot down again. <\/p>\n The attempt to replace Japanese with\u2026French?!<\/p>\n The Romaji Association, founded in 1921, kept pushing to abolish kanji. It didn\u2019t have a real chance of succeeding until after World War II. The occupying forces, operating as GHQ\/SCAP, were sympathetic to kanji abolition. Editorials in newspapers such as the Yomiuri called for kanji to be tossed. The Cabinet made the T\u014dy\u014d kanji\u00a0list (\u5f53\u7528\u6f22\u5b57) in November 1946, limiting the official characters used to 1,850, as a step toward full abolition.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, other people had some truly wild ideas. Writer Shiga Naoya had the novel proposal of replacing Japanese with French as its national language. In an essay called \u201cThe National Language Problem\u201d (\u56fd\u8a9e\u554f\u984c), Shiga labeled Japanese \u201cincomplete and inconvenient,\u201d and argued that it was holding back the nation\u2019s development.<\/p>\n The idea is even crazier when you realize that Shiga himself did not speak French. <\/p>\n While admitting he was \u201cunfamiliar with foreign languages,\u201d Shiga argued that French novels and poetry seem to resonate with Japanese sensibilities. In other words his argument came down, primarily, to vibes.<\/p>\n Homophones and high literacy keep kanji alive<\/p>\n GHQ\/SCAP nearly got its way. Then, in 1948, a survey killed its hopes and dreams.<\/p>\n The occupying forces\u2019 argument was that kanji were too hard to learn and that keeping them doomed the Japanese masses to ignorance. To prove its point, under its Civil Information and Education Section, it commissioned a nationwide reading-writing ability survey (\u65e5\u672c\u4eba\u306e\u8aad\u307f\u66f8\u304d\u80fd\u529b\u8abf\u67fb) on about 16,820 people aged 15-64.<\/p>\n The result? The survey found that illiteracy was \u201cextremely low\u201d \u2013 only around 1.7 to 2.1%. <\/p>\n The occupiers had made a (probably racially-tinged) assumption that Japanese were widely illiterate. But that hadn\u2019t been true for decades. Literacy climbed in the late Edo period thanks to the terakoya schools, which taught basic literacy to the masses. <\/p>\n Some estimates put late Edo-era literacy around 60%. That figure is highly contested. What\u2019s well-documented is that, thanks to the 1872 Gakusei ordinance, literacy skyrocketed with mass schooling in the Meiji Period. School enrollment rose from 28% in 1873 to 91.6% in 1902, reaching near-universality by the 1910s.<\/p>\n Coupled with these high literacy figures was a practical problem. Japanese is a language with an extremely large number of homophones. This is baked into the split between on-yomi (Chinese readings) and kun-yomi (Japanese readings), and Chinese pronunciation being compressed into Japanese morae when Japan adopted hanzi. This means a single pronunciation like \u3053\u3046 (k\u014d) can correspond to potentially dozens of characters. That led Japanese to use more niji-jukugo (\u4e8c\u5b57\u719f\u8a9e), or two-character compounds, to disambiguate words. <\/p>\n However, the wasei-kango (\u548c\u88fd\u6f22\u8a9e) boom of the Meiji Period undid some of that progress. The number of two-character compounds in Japanese exploded during this time as Japan created a bunch of new terms \u2013 shakai (\u793e\u4f1a; society), kenri (\u6a29\u5229, rights), etc. \u2013 to reflect Western concepts that didn\u2019t exist in Japan before.<\/p>\n Given all this, GHQ\/SCAP backed down. In 1981 the T\u014dy\u014d kanji gave way to the J\u014dy\u014d kanji (\u5e38\u7528\u6f22\u5b57), reframed from a hard cap to a flexible \u201cguide\u201d of 1,945 characters; a 2010 revision raised it to 2,136. <\/p>\n Planning a trip to Japan? Get an authentic, interpreted experience from Unseen Japan Tours<\/a> and see a side of the country others miss!<\/p>\n By 1965 the Japanese Language Council\u2019s chairman, Morito Tatsuo, declared the complete abolition of kanji \u201cnow inconceivable.\u201d Indeed, even the Romaji Association has given up the fight: the group officially dissolved in 2023<\/a>.<\/p>\n Korea\u2019s kanji aversion is rooted in Japanese colonialism<\/p>\n So why did Korea go a different route? A combination of practicality and colonialism.<\/p>\n Korean used Chinese characters for over a thousand years before King Sejong promulgated 28 letters as \u201cThe Proper Sounds to Instruct the People.\u201d Sejong\u2019s goal was to democratize reading: Chinese characters didn\u2019t easily fit the Korean language, so he created a system that \u201ca wise man could learn in a morning, and a fool in 10 days.\u201d <\/p>\n It didn\u2019t take off, though, for nearly 450 years. The Confucian establishment, led by Choe Manri, railed against hangul, arguing that only \u201cbarbarians\u201d like the Tibetans and the Japanese had their own script. Chinese characters, Choe argued, were the foundation of Confucian civilization. The scholar argued his point so hard that, at one point, Sejong threw him in jail. <\/p>\n But the Confucian scholars won for centuries. Hangul was called eonmun (\u8afa\u6587, \u201cvulgar\/vernacular script\u201d), or amgeul (\uc554\uae00, \u201cwomen\u2019s script,\u201d because there\u2019s nothing that Confucianists hate more than women).<\/p>\n This didn\u2019t change until the Gabo Reform of 1894 made the alphabet the basis for official government documents. Linguist Ju Si-gyeong christened the alphabet \u201changul\u201d in order to cast off the dismissive epithets. <\/p>\n Then the Japanese colonized Korea in 1910. This cemented the identification of hangul as a nationalist script, with the homegrown alphabet becoming a symbol of national identity and resistance. During this time, hangul continued to evolve: the Korean Language Society\u2019s 1933 Unified Hangul Orthography retired several archaic letters that had fallen out of use, and the use of double consonants and compound vowels helped better reflect the spoken language.<\/p>\n When Korea split into North and South, the North kept hangul, abolishing hanja from daily print in 1949. The South briefly banned teaching hanja in 1970 under Park Chung-hee, but repealed the ban two years later after public backlash. <\/p>\n A tale of two writing systems<\/p>\n Today, Chinese characters are still taught in South Korean schools. South Koreans still formally learn 1,800 hanja in school. However, the post-1970 \u201cHangul Generations\u201d can hardly read or use them. That\u2019s ignited a debate around strengthening hanja education in schools in order not to lose access to the country\u2019s history.<\/p>\n Korean, however, doesn\u2019t need hanja the same way that Japanese needs kanji. While 57% of Korean vocabulary comes from words originally written with hanja, Korean pronunciation adapted better to Chinese pronunciation, making the homophone problem less severe. <\/p>\n Japan, meanwhile, shows no signs of abandoning kanji. Indeed, as the thread above shows, kanji are now regarded as an indelible part of the language \u2013 and of national identity. <\/p>\n That\u2019s good news for fans of Japanese kanji. But perhaps, not good news for Japanese language learners. Better get busy memorizing characters if you want to pass the JLPT<\/a>, my friends \u2013 the language isn\u2019t changing anytime soon!<\/p>\n \t\tKeep reading<\/p>\n \t\tWait! Before You Go\u2026<\/p>\n Let’s stay in touch. Get our free newsletter and we’ll send you our best stories every week on Japan travel, culture, and news.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tWant a preview? Read our archives<\/a>. \tSources<\/p>\n \u6f22\u5b57\u5ec3\u6b62\u8ad6 \u30a6\u30a3\u30ad\u30da\u30c7\u30a3\u30a2<\/a><\/p>\n \u56fd\u8a9e\u56fd\u5b57\u554f\u984c \u30a6\u30a3\u30ad\u30da\u30c7\u30a3\u30a2<\/a><\/p>\n \u5f53\u7528\u6f22\u5b57 \u30a6\u30a3\u30ad\u30da\u30c7\u30a3\u30a2<\/a><\/p>\n \u56fd\u8a9e\u554f\u984c\u8981\u9818\uff08\u5831\u544a\uff09\uff0f\u56fd\u8a9e\u554f\u984c\u306e\u6b74\u53f2\u7684\u5c55\u671b \u6587\u5316\u5e81<\/a><\/p>\n \u65e5\u672c\u4eba\u306e\u8aad\u307f\u66f8\u304d\u80fd\u529b1948\u5e74\u8abf\u67fb\u306b\u304a\u3051\u308b\u975e\u8b58\u5b57\u7387\u3068\u751f\u5e74\u306e\u95a2\u4fc2 \u8a08\u91cf\u56fd\u8a9e\u5b66\uff08J-STAGE\uff09<\/a><\/p>\n Japanese script reform Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n \u30cf\u30f3\u30b0\u30eb\u5c02\u7528\u6587\u3068\u6f22\u5b57\u30cf\u30f3\u30b0\u30eb\u6df7\u3058\u308a\u6587 \u30a6\u30a3\u30ad\u30da\u30c7\u30a3\u30a2<\/a><\/p>\n \u671d\u9bae\u306b\u304a\u3051\u308b\u6f22\u5b57 \u30a6\u30a3\u30ad\u30da\u30c7\u30a3\u30a2<\/a><\/p>\n Falling literacy in South Korea revives debate over Chinese characters in classrooms Asia News Network<\/a><\/p>\n Hanja Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n Basic Hanja for Educational Use Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cTerakoya\u201d: Edo-Period Education for All Nippon.com<\/a><\/p>\n Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan (Richard Rubinger) University of Hawai\u2018i Press<\/a><\/p>\n \u56db\u3000\u5c0f\u5b66\u6821\u306e\u666e\u53ca\u3068\u5c31\u5b66\u72b6\u6cc1 \u6587\u90e8\u79d1\u5b66\u7701<\/a><\/p>\n \u660e\u6cbb\u671f\u306e\u5c0f\u5b66\u6821\u306e\u5c31\u5b66\u7387\u306f\u3069\u306e\u3088\u3046\u306b\u4e0a\u304c\u3063\u3066\u3044\u3063\u305f\u304b \u30ec\u30d5\u30a1\u30ec\u30f3\u30b9\u5354\u540c\u30c7\u30fc\u30bf\u30d9\u30fc\u30b9\uff08\u56fd\u7acb\u56fd\u4f1a\u56f3\u66f8\u9928\uff09<\/a><\/p>\n On\u2019yomi Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n Wasei-kango Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n History of Hangul Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n Ch\u2019oe Manli, anti-Hangul Confucian scholar Language Log<\/a><\/p>\n Gabo Reform Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/pixta_77912031_M-1024x682.jpg\")
Picture: Hirotama<\/a>\u00a0\/ PIXTA(\u30d4\u30af\u30b9\u30bf)<\/p>\n![\"Novelist](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image-10.jpg\")
Shiga Naoya, in his French era. (Picture: Wikipedia)<\/p>\n![\"Unseen](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1781486288_985_See-the-unseen-side-of-Japan.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Towering](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/pixta_102829828_M-1024x682.jpg\")
Picture: KinkinMK<\/a>\u00a0\/ PIXTA(\u30d4\u30af\u30b9\u30bf)<\/p>\n
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