One of the stranger aspects of Japan’s kanji-based writing system is the way many people lose some ability to write characters as they get older, although reading skill is generally not affected. I can read around 2500 kanji, including both the kun (Japanese) and on (Chinese) readings of most characters. My ability to write said characters is another matter, however, and since I haven’t studied the language formally for a decade or more, my writing skills are far lower than my reading. (I used to do “kanji battle” tests with my kids as they progressed through elementary school, but had to give it up because I kept getting beaten too badly.) As a foreigner I can perhaps be excused, but the phenomenon happens with native Japanese too: when J-List employees like Tomo or Yasu have to write something by hand in Japanese, it becomes a little more difficult to recall how to write the characters properly. The primary reason for the decline in kanji writing ability is the rise of pasocon (personal computers) and keitai (cell phones), which make producing kanji as easy as hitting a button until the character you want comes up. The technological advances we enjoy have brought great convenience, but at a cost, since almost everyone in Japan’s ability to write kanji is lower than it was a generation ago.
Yes, after studying Japanese at SDSU then living here for 17 years (ack! I shouldn’t have calculated that), I’m generally able to read most of the kanji characters that I happen across, unless I pick up a book about a specific subject I have no experience in, like biology or Buddhism; Japanese history is also a challenge, since by its nature it’s filled with archaic characters that are no longer used, but which are still important when talking about the past, which sucks since it’s one of my favorite subjects. Once I was driving with my wife and saw a character on a sign that was new to me; it turned out to be bunjo (分譲), literally meaning “dividing of land into smaller lots for sale.” In a country where half the population of the U.S. is crammed into a space 1/25 the size, there’s not really any “new” land for people to use, and a major way land is acquired is by waiting for some larger patch of it — a factory that moved to a new location, or agricultural land being opened for development — to be divided into smaller lots that people can snap up. Our own prefecture of Gunma is very conservative, and there’s a constant battle between groups that want to keep land zoned for agricultural use from being developed, versus people who want to do things like build houses on their own land, and it took us a year to get permisison to build the J-List office, since our land happens to be in one of these special agricultural zones. In Tokyo, the dynamics are different, since there are so many people and so little land, and it’s not uncommon for someone to cram a three-story home on a ridiculously tiny plot no bigger than three parking spaces.
