Chapter 5. Characters in Each Country

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5.1 Japanese language / used in Japan

This section is the text written by Tomohiro KUBOTA

.

Japanese is the only official language used in Japan. People in Okinawa islands and Ainu ethnic

group in Hokkaido region have each language, though they are used among few number of people

and they don't have own letters.

Japan is the only region where Japanese language is widely used.

5.1.1 Characters used in Japanese

There are three kinds of characters used in Japan, Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Arabic nu 

merical characters (same as European languages) are widely used in Japanese, though we have

Kanji numerical characters. Though Latin alphabets are not a part of Japanese characters, they are

widely used for proper nouns for companies and so on.

Hiragana and Katakana are phonogram derived from Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana characters

have one to one correspondence each other like upper and lower case of Latin alphabets. How 

ever,

toupper()

and

tolower()

should not convert Hiragana and Katakana each other. Hira 

gana contains about 100 characters and of course Katakana does. (FYI: about 50 regular characters,

20 characters with voiced consonant symbol, 5 characters with semi voiced consonant symbol, and

9 small characters.)

Kanji is ideogram imported from China roughly about 1   2 thousands years ago. Nobody knows

the whole number of Kanji and almost all of adult Japanese people know several thousands of

Kanji characters. Though the origin of Kanji is Chinese character, shapes are changed from original

ancient Chinese Kanji. Almost all Kanji have several ways to read, according to the word the Kanji

is contained.

5.1.2 Character Sets

JIS (Japan Industrial Standards) is an organization responsible for coded character sets (CCS) and

encodings used in Japan. The major coded character sets in Japan are:

  JIS X 0201 1976 Roman characters (Almost same to ASCII but 0x5c is Yen mark instead of

backslash and 0x7e is upper bar instead of tilde)

  JIS X 0201 1976 Kana (about 60 KATAKANA characters),

  JIS X 0208 1997 1st and 2nd levels (about 7000 characters including symbols, numeric charac 

ters, Latin, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets, Japanese HIRAGANA, KATAKANA, and KANJI),