Why does Japanese use kanji when it has kana?

[Ug_Caveman]

Something that puzzles me somewhat is why Japanese makes use of kanji so frequently when it has two separate scripts that can depict words in a similar fashion to the alphabet?

I've heard people say it would be very uncommon for something to be written solely in kana unless it was a children's book - how come?

(Please note I don't study Japanese [or any other Asian language] right now and don't intend to anytime in the near future - this question is coming from a very blank canvas of understanding and for academic curiosity.)

[白田龍]

At first when writing came into Japan it was 100% kanji. They did not use the Japanese language to write, but wrote in Chinese.

There were special rules to translate the written Chinese to Japanese spoken language, that every literate person knew.

With time they have started adapting the system to write the Japanese language, adding phonetic characters (kana) to indicate Japanese gramatical words that didn't had a counterpart in Chinese, which eventually lead to the hybrid system that we have today.

It's not like they use kanji just to do things the hard way. Ppl were literate in kanji long before kana was a thing.

[thevagrant88]

The short answer: convention. They’ve written this way for hundreds upon hundreds of years now and the Japanese are a notoriously conservative (stubborn) people who don’t feel the need to change. They still heavily, and I mean HEAVILY rely on fax machines for crying out loud. It’s just a massive part of their culture at this point. Even if they decided to abandon kanji, could you imagine how much work would be required to get that to happen? It would have to be a multigenerational process.

You’ll see some people, mostly learners, claiming that kanji actually makes it easier to read because of homophones and that’s why they use kanji. This is kinda crap for two reasons:

1) I’ve never seen this argument in the discussion amongst Japanese people. As in, Japanese pro-kanji lobbiest don’t make this claim to the best of my knowledge.

2) That’s not how reading works. If you don’t need extra semantic information in the spoken language to clear ambiguity then there’s no reason you’d need it in the written language.

I sometimes hear of Japanese people complaining when they try to consume material that’s written with kana and spaces between words (the Pokémon series of video games comes to mind) but this is entirely do to with people not being used to reading that way. Other languages with similarly small phoneme inventories get along just fine.

[Xenops]

Here is an article from Tofugu: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/must-use-kanji/

As someone approaching intermediate level in Japanese, I have come to really appreciate kanji. Yes, they are a pain at first--but I wouldn't trade them for names and sentences in kana. Nope. Kanji automatically create morpheme boundaries, and make the language easier to read.

Kanji also create fun nuances to the language that an alphabet language won't have. Each kanji can function as a morpheme (or several), and can have additional flavors of meaning.

A fun discovery, after learning 美しい ( beautiful) and 雪 (snow), I happened to start watching the anime Kindaichi Case Files. The name of the heroine? Miyuki, spelled 美雪 (beautiful snow). I now will remember those readings of the kanji.

[Sumisu]

In addition to what others have said, I think there are some deep cultural reasons for continuing to use kanji. It is a part of Japanese identity to go through the painful process of writing the kanji over and over all the way through junior high. On the one hand, I think a lot of Japanese people aren't particularly happy to have to do this, but on the other hand it is a part of their heritage going back more than a thousand years. And once the learning process is complete, native speakers effortlessly comprehend the current writing system, with its mix of hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

That said, languages change constantly, including Japanese, and it wouldn't surprise me if kanji went away eventually. There have been several proposals along those lines going back more than a century, but it has yet to happen.

[devilyoudont]

In term of reading, the system does not present problems and so there is no desire to change it. Yes, many people consider the mixed script to be beautiful and so don't want to change it. Yes, many people like that it connects them to the history of their language, and so don't want to change it. But, most people just do not care because the system does not cause problems for them... and also, it's much harder to make an appeal to tradition or aesthetics if something is too annoying. We are forced to conclude that this system must not be too annoying and so it must function.

Why does it function? All proficient readers of their native language read the same way regardless of their native language: they read by shape of the word, not by analysis of the parts of the word. I would guess that practically all people read more than they write. I encounter text all around me every day in my native language, even when I'm not reading for pleasure. I sometimes go several days without writing (or typing) any words at all. Additionally, reading for pleasure is much more common in Japan than it is in my country and even very young children sometimes have a hobby of reading for pleasure. When people say that Japanese children's books do not have kanji, they mean that books for toddlers will be hiragana only. Books that you might expect school age children to read will all have kanji in them (with reading aids which gradually phase out as the target demographic gets older). Books for elementary schoolers will have fewer kanji in them than books for adults, but this is largely because those books will be overwhelmingly written using Japanese native words--more on this later.

As Japanese children are totally fluent in the spoken language, completely surrounded by the written language, and likely reading for pleasure whether its comic books or novels or some kind of epic JRPG, they do not have the kinds of issues 2nd language learners have when they learn to read and write. Mainly, children get annoyed by writing kanji. Some of them are a pain in the ass to write and have like a million strokes. While we read based on shape, we do need to write by constructing words out lines so suddenly the component parts become much more important than otherwise, and some of these kanji look a lot alike especially outside of the context of a word. Japanese people use all kinds of weird shortcuts when writing the kanji, including tossing latin letters into them as abbreviations. However, when the government tried to reform kanji previously, the only part of the program which worked was the part which reduced strokes needed to write a given kanji. Attempts to reduce the number of kanji in use totally failed. More than failed, studies show Japanese people are using kanji slightly more frequently every year despite thinking that writing them is a pain in the ass. Why? Because modern computing solves the problem which was actually a problem for native speakers.

OK but what about rationality? Even if we accept that the current system stays in place because it does not create problems, can't we all admit that just using kana would be a more rational system? As such, shouldn't reforming kanji out of the language be pursued regardless of what ordinary people think?

Well, Japanese people find reading kana only text more difficult. Let's examine the reasons why kana, which while easy to write, is not easy to read (at least according to native speakers and foreigners with Stockholm syndrome).

Problem 1: Japanese people are not used to reading kana only text. It's sometimes compared to reading paragraphs in all caps or paragraphs without spaces. Yes, I can teach myself to do this.

Problem 2: The mixed script can be used to convey information about intonation which is often conveyed in the latin alphabet thru bold, italic, underline and whatever. Computer programs can add these things to Japanese text but it's not really used much and most seem to think it looks kind of janky. Ideally something pleasing would be created which works both horizontally and vertically. Or maybe everyone just gets used to how italic kana looks.

Problem 3: Kana more or less developed as a supplemental system and so does not fully capture the phonetics of spoken Japanese. Some reforms of the kana system would probably be necessary in order to retain the clarity of spoken Japanese. Of course this could also be done but now this is kind of starting to seem like a lot of work to fix something which isn't broken.

Problem 4: Homonyms. The problem here is not really like what most people imagine. Written Japanese and spoken Japanese use different registers and this means that both the grammar and the vocabulary are not fully aligned. There are some genres of literature which use the spoken register, but a lot of stuff will also use the literary language. Spoken Japanese uses mostly native words and the number of homonyms in the spoken language is totally normal. Native words also tend to have less kanji in them... it will be like 1 kanji and then a train of suffixes for each word. So, a kana-only system where only the spoken register exists would be more feasible. The written language is filled with words of Chinese origin. Japanese and Chinese phonology are a bad match and Japanese has a fairly limited set of possible syllables anyway. This means that words which were homonyms in Middle Chinese are homonyms in Japanese and also words which are distinct in Middle Chinese are homonyms in Japanese. Korean phonology is pretty similar to Japanese phonology in a lot of ways but: Korean has more vowels, Korean has a 3 way consonant distinction instead of a 2 way distinction (Japanese just has voiced and unvoiced), and Korean syllables allow more consonants as the coda. All of this is to say that some combination of these factors means that Chinese loans in Korean retain some more distinctions than in Japanese. Then finally, the fact that kana does not encode pitch means that also some homographs which are not homonyms are added into the mix. We could argue that Japanese should also abolish its literary language and everything should be written just as it would be said in Spoken Japanese but... these words are not only used to maintain the correct register. These words are also more technical and more specific than words which are used in day to day language. What happens when Japanese people need to speak technically in the spoken language? Well sometimes people misunderstand things and indicate that by saying "huh?" or "What was that?" or whatever. When the same thing happens in English, we tend to give a definition using more basic words. Japanese people tend to describe the kanji which make up the word instead and Japanese has rich vocabulary for describing kanji out loud. Yes, they could abandon the literary register and they could also change how they discuss technical terms when confusion occurs but at this point we are starting to limit how people can choose to express themselves artistically and dictate how native speakers should explain things to one another. This is starting to kind of seem like a really large change to fix something which causes no issues for native speakers.

No language is ever going to implement a large reform based on what's convenient for second language learners.

[księżycowy]

One thing that I think has only been lightly touched upon so far is the historical circumstances that lead to the development of Modern Written Japanese. Which is particularly interesting to me.

Kana developed not as a separate system from kanji, but from Kanji. Writing in Japan developed from Classical Chinese (as has been touched upon before in this thread), called Kanbun in Japanese. The first attempts at writing the native Japanese language were with kanji only. This is called Man'yōgana, and was an attempt to use Chinese Hanzi to represent the sounds of Japanese. Therefore it was the first "kana" system in use, based off Chinese hanzi.

Hiragana and Katakana were modeled off of this system of Man'yōgana and the hiragana and katakana characters are based off of the Man'yōgana characters of the same sound. Thus hiragana and katakana, historically at least, represent simplified kanji. In fact, the way in which each system independently developed is equally interesting. Katakana was developed by Buddhists monks and used primarily by men, and by contrast Hiragana was first used by women. All of this is to say that from a historical perspective at least, Kanji is the backbone of the writing system in Japan.

[tungemål]

The Japanese writing system is probably the worlds most complex and thus the most impractical, so like most Japanese learners I've also wondered about this. You could also ask why Japanese doesn't just use romaji. After all, Vietnamese, which was also once written witch Chinese characters, now uses the latin alphabet. This was enforced by the French colonial power.

I don't think there will ever be a reform. There were two (or three) key moments in Japanese history when that could've happened, but didn't:

0 - when the Chinese characters were first adopted 1500 years ago. I think the Indian scripts were known at the time, and the principle of only one character pr syllable must've been understood. The chinese system was still adopted because of the prestige of the Chinese literary tradition.

1 - the Meiji period (late 19th century), when Japan worked hard to become more "western" and to learn and take advantage of everything of the West. It was suggested to implement the latin alphabet, the romaji system was developed, but it never caught on.

2 - the US occupation after the second world war. Another point in history when Japan was "reset". Remember, USA drafted the Japanese constitution at the time. However USA was not interested in meddling with the script, and neither were the Japanese, even if the idea surfaced.

By the way, the Chinese were really close to abolishing the characters around this time. Mao was in favour of it, but it was not given priority. (see David Moser's "A billion voices").

[bolaobo]

You’ll see some people, mostly learners, claiming that kanji actually makes it easier to read because of homophones and that’s why they use kanji. This is kinda crap for two reasons:

It does make it easier to read though. Japanese people aren't making it intentionally harder for themselves. When you know a Kanji by heart, you read it faster than parsing multiple syllables. Hiragana and Katakana are very awkward, convoluted syllabaries like needing to write "ri yo u" to represent "ryou". It makes words longer than they need to be.

That’s not how reading works. If you don’t need extra semantic information in the spoken language to clear ambiguity then there’s no reason you’d need it in the written language.

Written language is different than the spoken language. Spoken language often has inherent context that written language lacks, and doesn't use as many technical terms, idioms, etc.

[dampingwire]

You’ll see some people, mostly learners, claiming that kanji actually makes it easier to read because of homophones and that’s why they use kanji. This is kinda crap for two reasons:

1) I’ve never seen this argument in the discussion amongst Japanese people. As in, Japanese pro-kanji lobbiest don’t make this claim to the best of my knowledge.

2) That’s not how reading works. If you don’t need extra semantic information in the spoken language to clear ambiguity then there’s no reason you’d need it in the written language.

I do agree that the reason for keeping kanji is probably convention and sentiment. (2) is quite possibly true for native speakers, but for the rest of us who are not native speakers, we don't have enough semantic information to disambiguate and we'll take every scrap of help offered, thank you very much

Long strings of kanji can be a pain, but longs strings of kana often leave me with far too many possible parsings and so I struggle. Obviously once I reach native-level proficiency, than that difficulty will disappear. Hopefully I'll remember to come back and delete this post then ...