Kyūjitai

When writing reform in Japan in 1946, the Chinese characters that correspond to the Chinese characters were replaced by new characters, usually with fewer strokes. The "old " Kanji were then as Kyūjitai (旧 字体; Kyūjitai in旧 字体; German "old characters " ) or Kyūkanji (旧 汉字; Kyūjitai in旧 汉字; German "old kanji" ) designated. The characters are newly created since then as Shinjitai (新 字体/新 字体) or Shinkanji (新 汉字) refers. These old signs are now in Japan almost entirely out of use, in contrast to the Chinese characters which are still in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong and even limited in the People's Republic of China.

Differences in publication and in the script before the writing reform

In Japan, several variants were used in parallel before the writing reform. The handwriting was different here in some versions of the publication. In the course of writing reform the cursive variants were mostly raised to the printing form.

Note: Not all fonts are shown the differences between the characters.

Today's use of the old Kanji

Nowadays, the old kanji are almost completely fallen out of use. There are virtually no books printed in more ancient kanji. In contrast, the old characters are still used to a limited extent highlighting. Thus, for in Japan even at some stores old versions as龟, etc.昼find. In names, such as personal names, geographical locations, or company name, the old characters are still needed. Examples:

• Mori Ōgai (森 鸥 外, today's version would森 鴎 外)
• Yasukuni Shrine (靖国神社, today variant靖国神社). The Yasukuni shrine itself uses the old version, street signs etc. but also use the new version.
• Akira Kurosawa (黒 泽 明, today :黒 沢 明Here, however, a mixture of old and new characters is present, the old version would be completely黑泽 明).

Some characters are also found today even in normal use. For example, the character for " dragon " (龙) has been simplified to竜, nevertheless龙is still very often. Other characters, such as国are still widespread. Other Kyūjitai, however, are almost extinct.

Old characters in computer typesetting

The old Kanji basically have their own code points in Unicode. For example, the ancient sign of国(U 56 FD) ,国, a unique code point U 570 under B. This same code points are also used in traditional Chinese. However, several minor differences, such as the radicals have been示/礻or食not coded separately in the course of Han unification. This meant that for a long time there was no possibility, at the Computer depicting old versions of Unicode, because only with a different font this could be displayed. For this reason, Unicode was not very popular in Japan. Only with the Ideographic Variation Selectors a possibility has been introduced to encode old characters.