All About Kanji
Jôyô 96 . . . teaching Kana and the Japanese Ministry of Education's Jôyô Kanji since 1996
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	The earliest writings systems of both East and West were pictographs; pictures that represented ideas. In the West, a few of these characters were simplified and came to represent the sounds of the spoken language, phonetic writing systems prevailing. In China, the pictographic system remained intact into the current age. But in modern Japan, perhaps owing to the grammatical and morphological differences between Chinese and Japanese, both methods co-exist in one written language.
	In the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, immigrating Chinese and Koreans brought the written characters known as Kanji, or Han Period (206 BC - 220 AD) characters to Japan. These characters actually originated in Hwang Ho (Yellow River) region of China around 2000 BC, of which some 3,000 from this era have been discovered. The Japanese language at that time appears to have existed in spoken form only, hence Chinese characters were borrowed over a 400 year period to express the Japanese oral language in writing.
Kun-yomi:  Written Chinese characters were used to express Japanese spoken words of like meaning. When a Japanese word's sound is expressed by a Kanji, the reading, or pronunciation of that character, is called a Kun-yomi reading, and is usually followed by a Japanese inflectional stem written in Hiragana, known as Okurigana.
On-yomi:  Attempts to pronounce the Chinese reading, or On-yomi reading, also entered into the Japanese linguistic system, along with the Chinese meaning. A little contemplation of this situation should shed some insight as to the reason why Kanji alone usually have Kun-yomi readings, and Kanji in compounds usually have On-yomi readings. Additionally, due to the constant evolution and change of the Japanese language, most modern Kanji have about 2 or 3 Kun-yomi and 2 or 3 On-yomi readings each.
Thus the addition of Chinese characters to Japanese increased in the number of concepts and methods of expression available to Japanese speakers, with the creation of many new terms and compounds. Comparatively, a similiar effect occured in the English language with the adaptation of Latin.
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	TYPES OF KANJI
	Ever since "Shuo Wen Chie Tsu", the first Chinese dictionary and the earliest known text to study the pictorial origin of Chinese characters, was written in the 2nd century AD, there have been six basic classifications of Chinese characters:
	Shôkei Moji:  Simple pictographs of objects like a tree.
	Shiji Moji:  Simple symbols representing abstract concepts like below or above.
	Kaii Moji:  An ideograph, combining pictographs and symbols to express a complex idea.
	Keisei Moji:  A category of phonetic-ideographs, which contains 85% of all Kanji, combining elements of semantic meaning with elements of phonetic meaning.
	Tenchû Moji:  Characters whose meaning or pronunciation have been changed by borrowing of the character to represent other sounds and ideas.
	Kasha Moji:  Pure phonetic characters, established as a sort of Kanji syllabary.
	Japanese Only
	In addition to the 6 traditional categories of Chinese characters, a seventh category exist for Kanji that have originated within Japanese:
	Kokuji:  The Kokuji are just a small number of Kanji that have originated from within Japan. Kokuji always have Kun-yomi readings, and never have On-Yomi readings.
	Kaisho:  Perhaps it should be mentioned, that while considerable standardization of characters existed in China as early as 300 BC, the square printed style writing, or Kaisho, which prototypes today's modern Kanji, was established around 200 AD.
Please see Professor Kenneth Henshall's A Guide To Remembering The Japanese Characters for the complete character history of the entire Jôyô Kanji set.
Jôyô Kanji:  Thus by the time of "Shuo Wen Chie Tsu" in the second century, Chinese characters had been both standardized, and categorized lexicographically, and the number of standardized characters had already grown to some 50,000.  As any Chinese character can in principle be a Japanese Kanji, some Japanese dictionaries listed about 50,000 as late as the Second World War.  However, during the occupation of Japan in 1946, Monbusho, or the Japanese Ministry of Education, began the task of simplifying the language.  At that time, the general public's ability to read newspapers and magazines required knowledge of at least 4,000 Kanji.
So, after careful research on character frequency within the language, Japan's Ministry of Education established 1,850 "Appropriate Use Characters" in 1946 called the Tôyô Kanji, and declared that only these Kanji should be used in printed public material such as newspapers (with the exception of an additional 284 Kanji which might be found in personal nouns and family names, known as the Jinmei-yô).  The first 881 of these characters were known as the Kyôiku, or "Educational Kanji" (all of which are drawn for the reader in a Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese).  Monbusho required all Japanese childen to master the Kyôiku prior to finishing six years of elementary school education.  Thus the Kyôiku half of the Tôyô are considered the essential characters.  Studies demonstrated that mastery of the Kyôiku Kanji alone allowed the Japanese student to read 90% of all written material in Japan, and mastery of the entire Tôyô set allowed the student to read 99%.
In 1977, the Kyôiku Kanji were revised to include 996 characters.  Then in 1992, students were required to also learn the ten roman numerals now common in Japanese, during the first six years of grade of school.  The new set of 1,006 characters became known as the Gakushû Kanji, or "Study characters".  Also, from 1981 onward, the 1,850 Tôyô Kanji (Appropriate Use) were replaced by 1,945 officially designated Jôyô Kanji, or "General Use Characters".  High school graduates are now required to master 95 more characters than during the intitial revision in 1946, but the schemes organization, especially with respect to the Gakushû Kanji set, is highly based on character frequency.  Thus time spent studying the earliest Jôyô/Jôyô 96 grades will yield the greatest return to the student.
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