Project Report: Kyūjitai and Historical Kana

As many people are aware, the Mainland Chinese government moved to simplify the forms of the hanzi/kanji (lit. Chinese characters; note that “hanzi” is the Chinese term and “kanji” the Japanese term) in use during the 1950s. However, not many are aware that the Japanese actually beat the Chinese to it! After the Second World War in 1945, the occupied Japanese government worked towards “simplifying” the Japanese language, namely by simplifying the forms of many characters in use (often by using shorthand pre-existing character forms), limiting said characters’ usage, and simplifying the kana (the Japanese “alphabet”; strictly speaking a syllabary) system that was in place.

While I won’t delve too much into it here, there is a group of people who still want to use this historical system, going so far as to call the pre-simplified system 正字正かな (“true/correct kanji and kana”). I personally don’t mind either system, but it would be disingenuous to not admit I prefer the style of the old system, especially the kanji forms. To this end, I worked towards searching on the Internet for ways in which I can easily input old character and kana forms.

While I did find some extremely useful tools and some IME (the system that allows you to input characters) add-on tools, I was relatively disappointed that many of the character forms used in these add-ons were incomplete in their coverage. To that end, I worked towards creating an “dictionary add-on” for the Google Japanese IME. In other words, I wanted to pick up where the other tools left off, so I created an IME dictionary that displays character forms that were used before the simplification process that may only have minor differences from their modern forms, with many characters going so far as to requiring a specialized font to even view (said fonts I will list out below).

The IME dictionary add-on I have compiled has over 10,000 entries. While it does not possess as many entries as the other IME dictionary add-ons I will be showcasing later on in this post that serve as a necessary complement to my IME dictionary add-on (the two others I use total to over 500,000 entries), it does largely “fill in the blanks” of the other dictionary add-ons.

This post will introduce several resources for inputting in these traditional/historical character forms. Said resources include a download link to the relevant IME dictionary add-on files, converters between kyuujitai and historical kana orthography, and an beginner’s introduction to the two (note: most of these resources are in Japanese!)