■Nathan Shiga: December 24

Those of you who write in Japanese or at least type out Japanese texts now have less headache typing complex Kanji characters thanks to the latest list of some 60 thousand Kanji characters now readily coded covering virtually all complex characters thus far blacked out when typed in.

Your alphabet comprises 26 letters with which to spell out any word of your choice. There is then no reason to have each letter of the alphabet “coded”, whereas in the Japanese language where three “alphabets” are employed, so to speak, to compose any standard Japanese sentence, namely Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji.

The first two, Hiragana and Katakana, are like the English alphabet, each letter with no meaning of its own, whereas the last one, Kanji, is not really an alphabet in the sense that each Kanji has its own meaning and mostly made out of multiple strokes. Further, it so happens that there are just as many Kanji characters that are sound alike but mean unlike as others that are spelled alike but sound unlike and so on.

So, it was keenly felt that the Kanjis have to be coded for ease of application. At the dawn of PC culture in Japan in about 1978, a total of as few as 6 thousand Kanjis were “entered” for general use. The first Japanese word-processor was marketed the following year, 1954, but the concept of coding Kanjis was not yet to be shared among the engineers.

Thus far, some 10 thousand Kanjis have been coded but there are quite a few that can display only via certain software. Occasions require certain choices of Kanji not in the list of coded Kanjis, in which case then a drawing software may have to be employed to draw them anew.

In 2002, the Information-Technology Promotion Agency (IPA) launched a program backed by the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry to have as many as 60 thousand Kanjis fully coded. The 15-year project now completed, the list of 60 thousand coded Kanjis is now registered as international standards.

As Senior Counselor of IPA Shuichi Tashiro puts it, Japan’ Kanji culture has at last caught up with the fast-evolving PC culture.

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