This kanji, kaeru, meaning return, was recently selected as the “Kanji of the Year” for 2002 by over 60,000 voters in a “Sign of the Times” poll sponsored by the Japan Kanji Proficiency Testing Foundation. The reasons for its top ranking in the survey are obvious to anyone living in Japan, as surely 2002 will always be remembered here as the year that 5 Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea in the 1970’s returned home to Japan. This event also accounts for kita (north) and ra (the first character in ratchi (abduction)) coming in 2nd and 3rd respectively. The placement of the ra character so high is interesting in that it is not one of the 1,945 general-use kanji (called jouyou kanji) “approved” by the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry (formerly Ministry of Education).
According to some, it was at the insistence of the Americans during the post-World War II Occupation that the then Japanese Ministry of Education decided to limit the number of kanji students were required to learn, and it began to weed out rarely used characters. At that time, there were some 4,000 characters that one needed to know in order to effectively read newspapers or magazines, and some dictionaries listed as many as 50,000 characters. Initially the Ministry decided upon 1,850 characters, a number that was increased in 1981 to the current 1,945. As this article points out, however, while Japanese learners such as myself thankfully don’t have to contend with learning 4,000 characters (to say nothing of 50,000!), there are still plenty of non-jouyou characters out there to give me fits and ensure that I will never get close enough to be burned by the proverbial light at the end of the kanji-learning tunnel.
In other language news I never got around to blogging, last December Japanese publisher Jiyukokuminsha published their 2003 Encyclopedia of Contemporary Words, a huge tome I’ve salivated over in the bookstore (but sadly, can’t read, so haven’t bought). In conjunction with the book’s publication, Jiyukokuminsha formed a committee and they came up with a top 10 list of new and popular words to enter the Japanese language in the last year. tamachan and waarudokappu (nakatsuemura) were chosen as the top 2 from this list. tamachan was coined by Fuji Television reporter Yuko Kurozumi to describe the seal that was discovered in the Tama river on August 7th of last year. waarudokappu (nakatsuemura) is for the small village in Oita prefecture that hosted the Cameroon team during the World Cup, an undertaking which quickly thrust the tiny village into the national spotlight.
(Kanji poll link found at Sydney Notes.)