Bill Moore's Japanese Font Mini-Tutorial Page.


Copyright © 1997 G. William Moore, MD, PhD.


This file may be copied and distributed without restriction.
  • THE JAPANESE WRITING SYSTEM.
  • JAPANESE KANJI. Written Japanese employs four "alphabets". Traditional written Japanese, or KANJI, was borrowed from the Chinese in the seventh century, and consists of a set of ideographs, or characters, each of which corresponds to an idea or concept. Unlike Western alphabets, in which each letter usually corresponds to a few sounds, Japanese Kanji do not necessarily have a unique, associated sound. Although written Chinese now has over 65,000 available ideographs, since World War II, the Japanese Kanji ideograph set has been limited by the Japan Ministry of Education to fewer than 2000, with an additional 5000 or so ideographs used in older literary works. The Kanji system is used to represent major concepts in the Japanese language, such as anatomical sites and diseases.
  • JAPANESE KANA. The two traditional phonetic Japanese "alphabets", or kanas, are: HIRAGANA and KATAKANA. Each of these phonetic alphabets, or more accurately syllabaries, correspond to 46 syllables in the Japanese language. In addition to the 46 basic Japanese syllables, there are additional diacritical marks which modify and expand the basic sounds of the two kana systems. For didactic purposes, the sounds for the two kana systems may be represented in a 10 x 5 table, as follows:
           a    i    u    e    o
      ka   ki   ku   ke   ko
      sa  shi   su   se   so
      ta  chi  tsu   te   to
      na   ni   nu   ne   no
      ha   hi   fu   he   ho
      ma   mi   mu   me   mo
      ya        yu        yo
      ra   ri   ru   re   ro
      wa                  wo    n

    Hiragana is used to represent grammatical particles (prepositions, auxiliary verbs, etc.). Katakana is used to represent loan-words from non-Japanese languages. Many high-technology terms, such as computer, monitor, keyboard, etc., are English loan-words transliterated in Katakana.
  • LEARNING THE JAPANESE KANA. as follows:
           a    i    u    e    o
      ka   ki   ku   ke   ko

  • JAPANESE ROMAJI. Finally, Japanese may be written phonetically with the Roman alphabet, namely, ROMAJI. Although every educated Japanese person can read and write Romaji, one cannot write unambiguous Japanese purely in Romaji, because many distinct concepts have the same sound, and must be disambiguated in written text by the much richer system of Kanji ideographs. Experts claim that the post-World-War-II technology explosion in Japan has, if anything, increased the Japanese dependence on concept-rich (but Westerner-difficult) Kanji ideographs.
  • FOREIGN LANGUAGE FONTS ON THE COMPUTER.
    All computer text consists internally of a stream of BYTES, or numbers ranging in value from 0 to 255 (i.e., 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 possibilities). The assignment table which points each byte-number to a text-character on your computer monitor or on a printout is called a FONT. Since early computer software was largely developed in the USA, the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, upper- and lower-case, as well as numerals, punctuation, and device-controls (e.g., space, new-line, new-page, back-space, etc.) were assigned to byte-numbers ranging between 0 and 127. This assignment table is known as the American Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), and has been officially adopted by the International Standards Organization (ISO). For example in ASCII, A=65, B=66, C=67,..., a=97, b=98, c=99,..., backspace=8, newpage=12, etc. However, the remaining byte-numbers, ranging between 128 and 255, are not even sufficient to accommodate all the European languages using Roman alphabets, with their various accents, umlauts, circumflexes, cedillas, tildes, etc. Consider the following, partial list of languages requiring alphabetic fonts: 
    Afrikaans   Akkadian   Albanian   American-Indian   Amharic   Arabic   
Armenian   Aymara   Basque   Belgium   Belorussian   Bemba   Bengali   
Blackfoot   Bohemian   Brazilian   Bretan   Bretonian   Bulgarian   
Burmese   Byelorussian   Cambodian   Catalan   Chamarra   Cherokee   
Chinese   Coptic   Cree   Croatian   Crow   Cyrillic   Czech   Danish   
Dutch   Esperanto   Estonian   Farcese   Farsi   Fijian   Finnish   
Flemish   French   Frisian   Gaelic   Ganda   Georgian   German   
Glagolitic   Greek   Guarani   Gujarati   Hawaiian   Hebrew   
Hieroglyphics   Hindi   Hungarian   Icelandic   Indonesian   Inuit   
Inuktitut   Irish   Italian   Japanese   Kango   Kannada   Khmer   
Kikuyu   Korean   Kpeile   Kwakwala   Laotian   Lappish   Latin   
Latvian   Lithuanian   Littera   Luxembourgian   Macedonian   Malagasy   
Malay   Malayalam   Malinke   Maltese   Maori   Marathi   Mayan   
Mohawk   Moldavian   Mongolian   Nahauati   Nepali   Netherlands   
Norwegian   Nyanja   Nynorsk   Oriya   Papiamento   Pashto   Persian   
Polish   Portuguese   Provencal   Punjabi   Quechua   Roman   Ruanda   
Rumanian   Rundi   Runic   Russian   Samoan   Sanskrit   Serbian   
Sinhalese   Sioux   Slavonic   Slovak   Slovenian   Somalia   Sotho   
Spanish   Sudanese   Swahili   Swazi   Swedish   Swiss   Syriac   
Tagalog   Tahitian   Tamil   Telugu   Tewa   Thai   Tibetan   Tongan   
Tswana   Turkish   Ukrainian   Urdu   Vietnamese   Visayan   Welsh   
Wendish   Wolof   Xhosa   Yukon
    Among these languages, three Chinese-based writing systems require more than 256 letters: Chinese, Japanese, and Traditional Korean.
  • JAPANESE FONTS ON THE COMPUTER.
    Since the Japanese writing system requires more than 256 letters, there are several font systems for Japanese which employ two consecutive bytes (i.e., which accommodate 256 x 256 = 65,536 assignments.) Strictly speaking, Chinese does not fit into a 65,536-character font, but many Chinese characters occur so infrequently in text that they may be composed on-the-fly on an as-needed basis. The most popular Japanese fonts are: JIS (=Japan Industrial Standard), Shift-JIS (SJIS), and EUC (=European Union Characters). On the Internet, Shift-JIS appears to be the most popular Japanese font. This tutorial employs Shift-JIS. If you display a SJIS output on a computer without an installed SJIS Japanese font, then all the Japanese words in the output will appear as gibberish.
  • INSTALLING A JAPANESE FONT ON THE COMPUTER. Currently, you must purchase a SJIS Japanese font, for prices ranging from $50 to several hundred dollars. Our office uses the UnionWay SJIS Japanese Font, but many other vendors are advertised on the Internet.
    When you obtain your font, you should install it according to the vendor's instructions. In Windows 97, you typically begin by clicking on START, then SETTINGS, then CONTROL PANEL, then double-clicking on FONT, then clicking on INSTALL NEW FONT, then entering the filename of your new font. Then go into your Internet Browser (Netscape, Microsoft, etc.) and change your fontname under OPTIONS.
    Caution: Most one-byte fonts occupy only about 10 kilobytes on your computer RAM memory, but two-byte fonts may occupy up to 7 megabytes, and may challenge your computer's memory and slow down your Internet browser.
  • SAMPLE JAPANESE WORDS IN THE SJIS FONT.
    CHI BLOOD 血
    CHI THOUSAND 千
    CHII SMALL 小
    HIGASHI EAST 東
    HITO PERSON 人
    INU DOG 犬
    JIN BENEVOLENCE 仁
    KAWA RIVER 川
    MIZU WATER 水
    MO SAY 申
    NI TWO 二
    O KING 壬
    ONNA WOMAN 女
    OTOKO GENTLEMAN 男
    SHIN FAITH 信
    SHIN FOREST 森
    SHIN TRUST 信
    SO CHILD 子
    TAN DAWN 旦
    TO TEN 十
    USHI COW 牛
    YAMA MOUNTAIN 山
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  • For additional information, contact Bill Moore at:
    gwmoore@erols.com