Why are Japanese still using kanji?
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The Koreans and Vietnamese got rid of them within the last century, even the Chinese — for more than a century — seriously considered abolishing the sinographs, and have simplified them until they are but a pale remnant of what they used to be. Moreover, after WWI, when — with the help of the American occupation — Japan had a real chance to switch to an alphabet, the Japanese, on the whole, still clung to the kanji. This is not to mention that the first great novel in an East Asian language, The Tale of Genji (before 1021 AD), which has a stature in Japan similar to that= of Shakespeare in the United Kingdom (Sonja Arntzen), was written by Lady Murasaki in the phonetic hiragana syllabary (aka "women's writing").
The fact that the Japanese still have not abandoned the archaic morphosyllabic / logographic script is a conundrum that has puzzled me since I first learned Chinese and Japanese more than half a century ago. Such a fundamental question about the history of East Asian writing is one that could scarcely escape the attention of rishika Julesy. Here is her video about this thorny matter, "Why Kanji Survived in Japan (But Not in Korea or Vietnam)" (22:25). I am confident that, as always, she will have something enlightening to say about this perplexing subject.
Well, this was the longest and arguably the most challenging video for Julesy to make, but, as usual (always?), she nails it. In the first part of her presentation, Julesy dives deep into the linguistic and practical side of the problem. In the second (relatively shorter) part of the presentation, she looks at the cultural and emotional aspects of the three countries' (Vietnam, Korea, and Japan) attachment to sinographs.
As usual, Julesy inevitably says something near the end that I disagree with. In this case, she faintly suggests that it might be nice if Korea and Vietnam welcomed back some of the sinographs so they could better understand the background of many common words in their languages. I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell that will happen — unless China resubjugates Vietnam and Korea. In the current global order and economy, that doesn't seem very likely either.
One biggie that Julesy has yet to tackle, but is related to several of her previous investigations, including this one, is how English has factored in East Asian language development during the past century and more. Knowing Julesy's scientific bent well enough not to expect her to predict the future, I'd be happy enough just to hear her analysis of what has already happened with English in East Asia during the last century and more.
Selected readings
- "'The insane effort to preserve this ancient script'" (10/2/25) — with Julesy bibliography
- "Yet another sinographic stumbling block for Chinese modernization" (11/13/25)
- "Character amnesia and kanji attachment" (2/24/16)
- "The Heisig method for learning sinographs" (8/17/25)
- "Japanese survey on forgetting how to write kanji" (9/24/12) — with long bibliography
- "More katakana, fewer kanji" (4/4/16)
Laura Morland said,
December 5, 2025 @ 6:16 pm
And… she did!
Julesly published this video a little while ago, and so I don't recall all the details, but as I recall, one important factor is that Japanese has FAR fewer homopohones than does Vietnamese and Chinese.
Another is that neither hiragana nor katakana inserts spaces between words, and so kanji provides the visual aid of indicating new words.
Hope my memory is correct….
Scott P. said,
December 5, 2025 @ 6:47 pm
Laura,
Do you mean Japanese has MORE homophones?
Neil Kubler said,
December 5, 2025 @ 8:13 pm
If two Japanese people can understand each other when speaking (which they with few exceptions obviously can), it stands to reason that if they wrote more or less as they speak, then they could write everything in hiragana, katakana, or romanization and be understood. Kanji are not needed. The same logic applies to Chinese.
Victor Mair said,
December 5, 2025 @ 8:17 pm
Thank you for your penetrating percipience, Neil.
Jonathan Smith said,
December 5, 2025 @ 11:03 pm
Re: first two comments, the extent of homophony in a language (a word problem) is not the same as number of permissible syllables (a syllable problem). Being natural languages, all of Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese have minimal/manageable homophony and homophony per se thus has zero bearing on the question of retention vs. retirement of Kanji.
Relatedly, it's been suggested in LL comments (see e.g. threads entitled Homographobia and Hmophonophobia) that in Japanese and/or Chinese, Kanji enable a written idiom wherein texts are not readily understandable to a listener. This is possible in theory but I very much doubt any such (serious! modern!) texts exist in real life; counterexamples welcome.
Chris Button said,
December 6, 2025 @ 12:08 am
The Tale of Genji is probably not the fairest comparison.
According to Frellesvig (2010), the lexical frequency of Sino-Japanese loanwords in the text is only 4.8%. The text frequency is higher at 12.6% but still paltry.
Tangentially, I just finished reading Gari Ledyard's amazing book The Korean Language Reform of 1446. His discussion about the role of 'phags-pa is truly fascinating. But it comes with a crucial caveat on page 437:
"Nothing would disturb me more, after this study is published, than to discover in a work on the history of writing a statement like the following: 'According to recent investigations, the Korean alphabet was derived from the Mongol 'phags-pa script…'."
And yet, according to Robert Ramsey's comment on a recent LLog thread, the proposal clashed with certain nativist views in Korea.
AG said,
December 6, 2025 @ 7:15 am
A selfish and non-linguistic comment: The Japanese tendency to not immediately abandon things when other nations would has been a source of immense joy throughout my life. Pilot makes cheap ballpoints, but they also still make possibly the world's best fountain pens, and I'm glad they do.
Philip Taylor said,
December 6, 2025 @ 7:25 am
"Pilot makes cheap ballpoints, but they also still make possibly the world's best fountain pens" — in which case, let us sincerely hope that Cardfactory's products are not exported to Japan :
Chris Button said,
December 6, 2025 @ 7:44 am
How much "iikae" (rephrasing) of "kango" (Sino-Japanese words) into "wago" (native Japanese words) is done when presenting a formal piece of writing orally for rapid comprehension?
The dedicated existence of NHK's "News Web Easy" suggests that this kango-wago relationship perhaps takes the definition of "easy words" in Japanese beyond just a children's/learner language definition in other languages.
Scott P. said,
December 6, 2025 @ 10:58 am
If two Japanese people can understand each other when speaking (which they with few exceptions obviously can), it stands to reason that if they wrote more or less as they speak, then they could write everything in hiragana, katakana, or romanization and be understood. Kanji are not needed. The same logic applies to Chinese.
In speaking, there are more contextual clues to disambiguate words than there is in a written text. I've also heard that gestures are frequently used, with some speakers even miming writing a particular character to clarify a homophone.
Peter Grubtal said,
December 6, 2025 @ 11:26 am
Josh R. 's comment in the previous thread:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71720
can't be beaten, in my opinion
Stephen Goranson said,
December 6, 2025 @ 11:54 am
Even I, largely ignorant on such, have seen Chinese, using a finger on a palm to convey the character.
JMGN said,
December 6, 2025 @ 12:05 pm
I feel the real question should be "why sould they not anymore?"
Jon Forrest said,
December 6, 2025 @ 12:27 pm
I managed to offend a very well educated native speaker of Chinese when I put forth the proposition that characters weren't linguistically necessary in Chinese. At the time I was careful to agree that the characters had major non-linguistic value but it wasn't enough.
David Morris said,
December 6, 2025 @ 4:02 pm
Korean high school students were learning hanja when I taught English there in 2008-9, and a quick search suggests that they still are.
David Marjanović said,
December 6, 2025 @ 4:08 pm
Direct link to the comment, and I agree.
David Morris said,
December 6, 2025 @ 4:19 pm
The most common use of Chinese/Japanese writing I saw in Korea is at train stations. The bigger signs have Korean, English, Chinese and Japanese.
Victor Mair said,
December 6, 2025 @ 4:32 pm
@David Marjanović:
Peter Grubtal already gave us the direct link to Josh R.'s comment.
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Middle English, and I would not say that the English-speaking world uses 15th-century spelling conventions.
The logic of you three doesn't explain why Japanese partially cling to kanji while Koreans and Vietnamese abandoned them. Julesy's nuanced, reasoned, and documented explanation makes far more sense.
It's one thing for Josh R. to make his sensational (but hollow) claims, but for PG and DM then simply to repeat them is mòmíngqímiào 莫名其妙 ("baffling / inexplicable / strange / odd / unaccountable").
Philip Taylor said,
December 6, 2025 @ 4:41 pm
Well, let me try to offer a different perspective — why is Shinto the majority religion in Japan while Christianity is the majority religion in most (if not all) of the English-speaking world ?
anon said,
December 6, 2025 @ 4:50 pm
She forgot to mention Wa State in Myanmar they also use Chinese characters as one of the official writing system of the Wa language. They also made Mandarin one of the official languages of the state.
Stephen Goranson said,
December 6, 2025 @ 5:52 pm
That Julsey "forgot" Myanmar Wa usage might be a presumption, given the complexity of what she already did take on.
Victor Mair said,
December 6, 2025 @ 6:57 pm
Indeed!
Chris Button said,
December 6, 2025 @ 6:33 pm
I don't think this is correct.
Wa State straddles Myanmar and China, but neither Chinese nor Burmese scripts are used to write the language.
Chris Button said,
December 6, 2025 @ 6:43 pm
I also highly doubt this to be true–at least from the perspective of Wa State. But, unlike the script, I can't say that with confidence.
~flow said,
December 7, 2025 @ 6:15 am
> The fact that the Japanese still have not abandoned the archaic morphosyllabic / logographic script is a conundrum that has puzzled me since I first learned Chinese and Japanese more than half a century ago.
FWIW I've been dabbling in Ancient Egyptian recently and it's surprising how many principles of writing that we encounter the world over have already been present at this earliest stage—one of the earliest stages of writing that we know of, together with Mesopotamian cuneiform writing systems. They had pictographs, of course, but they also had highly conventionalized classifiers, not unlike what you see in Chinese where e.g. the Silk radical is used to write many morphemes that have ceased to be directly intertwined [hah] with silk as such. They also had phonetic writing, mostly in the form of signs that signify one to three consonants and where the pictorial content becomes irrelevant. As can be gleaned from the Rosetta stone in the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, they had developed ways to write vowels, too, although in a somewhat clumsy way, and mostly used only for foreign proper names and loans, but present already a thousand years before the Rosetta stone was engraved. Last but not least, there's a recurrence, a standardization in writing over the millennia that is astounding in its time depth. And it's also an enigmatic script, for example Egyptologists are still trying to figure out the proper reconstruction of the name Osiris which is, most of the time, written as an eye above a throne which tells you next to nothing how it was read.
In all, I find some aspects of Ancient Egyptian culture and script surprisingly modern, despite its age.
FWIW some Korean texts definitely do profit from or even necessitate the use of additional Hanja, I've frequently seen them used in academic papers. Other than that, at least around the early 2000s the characters 南 and 北 would be frequently seen in newspaper headlines. And why not? These are easily learned symbols with 'obvious' (well, for the ones who learned them, but that goes for 100% of all writing) meanings and unambiguous readings. A few hundred of these would certainly go a long way to liven up most modern Korean texts that are rife with Sino-Korean loans. There's a reason these newspapers used to use Hanja which are, at this point, a 100% opt-in.
*Edit* so I went through some South Korean newspaper homepages, and here are some samples of what I found on https://www.chosun.com and https://www.donga.com ; as such, this is an arbitrary selection but it seems to tell me that some newspapers still think that some Hanja are approved by their audience not unlike they expect the occasional sprinkle of Latin letters, mostly in abbreviations like AI and F-15. Just imagine a Western newspaper using one or two Hanja / Kanji / Hanzi in a headline, and that *without* transcription:
* 조슈아 반, 판토자 누르고 '亞 남성 최초' UFC 챔피언
* 美 "한국 돈으로 원전부터 건설" 우리는 '감원전'한다니
* 中 전투기 '오키나와 도발' 日 전투기에 레이더 발사
* 李대통령-손정의 AI 협력
* 韓 ‘ARM 스쿨’ 이달내 윤곽… “반도체 설계역량 강화할 자산”
* “AI인재 연봉 프리미엄, 한국 6%-美는 25%”
* 中전투기 ‘의도적 도발’…日자위대 F-15에 2차례 레이더 쐈다
* 女 중고생, 주말엔 하루 7시간 스마트폰
* ‘현지 누나’ 파장…野 “V0의 국정농단” vs 與 “김건희와 달라”
* 전기차 격전지 되는 韓…외산 공세 속 방어책 찾는 현대차그룹[자동차팀의 비즈워…
* “유럽, 20년내 알아볼 수 없게 될것” 美 진단에 유럽 발칵
Victor Mair said,
December 7, 2025 @ 8:52 am
We have residue of Greek (esp. philosophy, science), Latin (lots and lots of it, esp. law, medicine), Italian (music, cooking), French (about 60% of everything), etc., etc.
Recently, also with the help of Julesy, we dissected the Chinese typewriter. In the past, with the assistance of my capable colleagues in the Penn Museum, I have dabbled in typewriting and typesetting Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian, and other ancient languages. If I find time, I will dive more deeply into them in the coming years.