Japan Adds Kanji to Education List, Includes `Depression`
Baku, November 29 (AZERTAC). Japan`s Ministry of Education will add 196 kanji to its list of common characters, the first change since the list was established in 1981, as the spread of computers allows writers to type out difficult characters.
The “Joyo Kanji,” a standardized list of 1,945 characters taught to Japanese students through high school, will be expanded to 2,136 characters starting tomorrow, said Yasuhiro Takeda, a researcher at the ministry`s language division. Five kanji will be removed from the list.
Review of the additions started in 2005, when an initial list of 45,000 kanji from books, websites and newspapers were selected by the ministry. The list was pared by the Council for Cultural Affairs, a government body comprising professors, authors and corporate executives, using public comments through the Internet, Takeda said.
“Our daily life has significantly changed since the guide was made 29 years ago,” said Takeda. “Now it`s more common to type characters instead of handwriting them.”
“Utsu,” one of the new characters, means depression and has 29 strokes. The character has been typically written in hiragana, the Japanese phonetic alphabet. “Monme,” a Japanese measurement of weight, is among the five characters being removed from the list. A 5-yen coin weighs one monme.
The literacy rate for Japanese older than 15 years is 99 percent, according to United Nations Development Program Report 2009.
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