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Meiji period
The significant reforms of the 19th century Meiji era did not initially impact the Japanese writing system, however the language itself was changing due to the increase in literacy resulting from education reforms, the massive influx of new words; both borrowed from other languages or newly coined, and the ultimate success of movements such as the influential 言文一致 (genbun'itchi) which resulted in Japanese being written in the colloquial form of the language instead of the wide range of historical and classical styles used previously. The difficulty of written Japanese was a topic of debate, with several proposals in the late 1800s that the number of kanji in use be limited. In addition, exposure to non-Japanese texts led to (unsuccessful) proposals that Japanese be written entirely in kana or romaji. This period saw Western-style punctuation marks introduced into Japanese writing (Twine, 1991).
In 1900, the Education Ministry introduced three reforms aimed at improving the education in Japanese writing:
standardization of the hiragana script, eliminating the range of hentaigana (変体仮名) then in use;
restriction of the number of kanji taught in elementary schools to about 1,200;
reform of the irregular kana representation of the Sino-Japanese readings of kanji to make them conform with the pronunciation.
The first two of these were generally accepted, but the third was hotly contested, particularly by conservatives, to the extent that it was withdrawn in 1908 (Seeley, 1990).
[edit]Pre-World War II
The partial failure of the 1900 reforms with the rise of nationalism in Japan effectively prevented further significant reform of the writing system. The period before World War II saw numerous proposals to restrict the number of kanji in use, and several newspapers voluntarily restricted their kanji usage and increased usage of furigana; however, there was no official endorsement of these, and indeed much opposition.
[edit]Post-World War II
The period immediately following World War II saw a rapid and significant reform of the writing system. This was in part due to influence of the Occupation authorities, but to a significant extent was due to the removal of conservatives from control of the educational system, which meant that previously stalled revisions could proceed. The major reforms were:
alignment of kana usage with modern pronunciation (現代仮名遣い gendaikanazukai), replacing the old historical kana usage (1946);
promulgation of various restricted sets of kanji:
tōyō kanji (当用漢字) (1946), a collection of 1850 characters for use in schools, textbooks, etc.;
kanji to be used in schools (1949);
an additional collection of jinmeiyō kanji (人名用漢字), which, supplementing the tōyō kanji, could be used in personal names (1951);
and simplifications of various complex kanji letter-forms (shinjitai).
At one stage an advisor in the Occupation administration proposed a wholesale conversion to rōmaji; however it was not endorsed by other specialists and did not proceed. (Unger, 1996)
In addition, the practice of writing horizontally in a right-to-left direction was generally replaced by left-to-right writing. The right-to-left order was considered a special case of vertical writing, with columns one character high, rather than horizontal writing per se; it was used for single lines of text on signs, etc. (e.g. the station sign at Tokyo read 駅京東).
The post-war reforms have mostly survived, although some of the restrictions have been relaxed. The replacement of the tōyō kanji in 1981 with the 1,945 jōyō kanji (常用漢字) was accompanied by a change from "restriction" to "recommendation", and in general the educational authorities have become less active in further script reform (Gottlieb, 1996).
In 2004, the jinmeiyō kanji, maintained by the Ministry of Justice, was significantly enlarged.