Shinjitai (in shinjitai
???; in
kyujitai ???; meaning "new character form") are the forms of
kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the
Toyo Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in shinjitai are also found in
simplified Chinese, but shinjitai is generally not as extensive in the scope of its modification. Thus, modern Japanese kanji more closely resembles
traditional Chinese characters. It should be mentioned that Japanese writing has undergone many other changes – a number of words are now normally written in
hiragana only (e.g. simple words, particles) or
katakana (e.g. onomatopoeia, loanwords, animals). Thus the overall number of kanji in use in modern Japanese is much smaller than in Chinese.
Shinjitai were created by reducing the number of strokes in kyujitai (???/???, "old character form"), unsimplified Kanji equivalent to Traditional Chinese characters, also called ?? seiji, meaning proper/correct characters through a process (similar to that of Simplified Chinese) of either replacing the tsukuri (?, right-hand part of a Kanji) indicating the On reading with another character of the same On reading with fewer strokes, or replacing a complex component of a character with a simpler one.
There have been a few stages of simplifications made since the 1950s, but there have been no changes made since the promulgation of the Joyo Kanji List in 1981.
The following forms were established as a result of the postwar character reforms. However, they were not completely created anew, as many were based on widely used handwritten abbreviations (ryakuji, ??) from the prewar era. This page [1] shows examples of these handwritten abbreviations, identical to their modern shinjitai forms, from the prewar era. Due to the complexity of kanji, many abbreviations were used in handwriting, whose status rose to become official characters in the postwar reforms. Attention was paid to the aesthetic balance of the characters in their new form.
