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93-472: Japanese is normally written in a combination of logographic characters borrowed from Chinese ( kanji ) and syllabic scripts ( kana ) that also ultimately derive from Chinese characters. There are several different romanization systems. The three main ones are Hepburn romanization , Kunrei-shiki romanization (ISO 3602) and Nihon-shiki romanization (ISO 3602 Strict). Variants of the Hepburn system are

186-406: A National Institute of Health for research, and set up statistical divisions and data collection systems. One of the most significant actions of SCAP during the occupation was the drafting of a new Japanese constitution. One of MacArthur's top priorities was an overhaul of the existing Meiji Constitution , to bring the country in line with its new democratic government. He gave the task of drafting

279-652: A collection of Aesop's Fables (romanized as Esopo no fabulas ). The latter continued to be printed and read after the suppression of Christianity in Japan (Chibbett, 1977). From the mid-19th century onward, several systems were developed, culminating in the Hepburn system , named after James Curtis Hepburn who used it in the third edition of his Japanese–English dictionary, published in 1887. The Hepburn system included representation of some sounds that have since changed. For example, Lafcadio Hearn 's book Kwaidan shows

372-454: A disadvantage for processing homophones in English. The processing disadvantage in English is usually described in terms of the relative lack of homophones in the English language. When a homophonic word is encountered, the phonological representation of that word is first activated. However, since this is an ambiguous stimulus, a matching at the orthographic/lexical ("mental dictionary") level

465-422: A disadvantage in processing, as has been the case with English homophones, but found no evidence for this. It is evident that there is a difference in how homophones are processed in logographically coded and alphabetically coded languages, but whether the advantage for processing of homophones in the logographically coded languages Japanese and Chinese (i.e. their writing systems) is due to the logographic nature of

558-585: A fairly lenient approach. As Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, MacArthur decided not to prosecute Shiro Ishii and all members of the bacteriological research units in exchange for germ warfare data based on human experimentation . On May 6, 1947, he wrote to Washington that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence." The deal

651-516: A fixed combination of a radical that indicates its nominal category, plus a phonetic to give an idea of the pronunciation. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, while lacking ideographic components. Chinese scholars have traditionally classified the Chinese characters ( hànzì ) into six types by etymology. The first two types are "single-body", meaning that

744-501: A following naked vowel or semivowel). For example, the name じゅんいちろう is written with the kana characters ju - n - i - chi - ro - u , and romanized as Jun'ichirō in Revised Hepburn. Without the apostrophe, it would not be possible to distinguish this correct reading from the incorrect ju - ni - chi - ro - u ( じゅにちろう ). This system is widely used in Japan and among foreign students and academics. Nihon-shiki romanization

837-541: A millennium in different but essentially similar forms, was abolished by the new Japanese constitution that was heavily influenced by MacArthur. This was similar to the European peerage system involving princes, barons and counts that were not part of the royal family. Also, the extended royal family, called ōke and shinnōke , was abolished and stripped of all rights and privileges, transforming into commoners immediately. The only Japanese that were allowed to call themselves

930-476: A part of royalty or nobility after the U.S. occupation were the emperor and about 20 of his direct family members . This action by MacArthur and the writers of the constitution helped transform Japan drastically by abolishing all of the old extended royal family class and the nobility class. One of the largest of the SCAP programs was Public Health and Welfare, headed by US Army Colonel Crawford F. Sams. Working with

1023-660: A picture of an elephant, which is pronounced zou in Japanese, before being presented with the Chinese character 造 , which is also read zou . No effect of phonologically related context pictures were found for the reaction times for reading Chinese words. A comparison of the (partially) logographically coded languages Japanese and Chinese is interesting because whereas the Japanese language consists of more than 60% homographic heterophones (characters that can be read two or more different ways), most Chinese characters only have one reading. Because both languages are logographically coded,

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1116-463: A practical limitation in the number of input keys. There exist various input methods for entering logograms, either by breaking them up into their constituent parts such as with the Cangjie and Wubi methods of typing Chinese, or using phonetic systems such as Bopomofo or Pinyin where the word is entered as pronounced and then selected from a list of logograms matching it. While the former method

1209-429: A recent reconstruction by William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart – but sound changes in the intervening 3,000 years or so (including two different dialectal developments, in the case of the last two characters) have resulted in radically different pronunciations. Within the context of the Chinese language, Chinese characters (known as hanzi ) by and large represent words and morphemes rather than pure ideas; however,

1302-460: A relatively robust immunity to the effect of context stimuli, Verdschot et al. found that Japanese homophones seem particularly sensitive to these types of effects. Specifically, reaction times were shorter when participants were presented with a phonologically related picture before being asked to read a target character out loud. An example of a phonologically related stimulus from the study would be for instance when participants were presented with

1395-429: A semantic/ideographic component (see ideogram ), called "determinatives" in the case of Egyptian and "radicals" in the case of Chinese. Typical Egyptian usage was to augment a logogram, which may potentially represent several words with different pronunciations, with a determinate to narrow down the meaning, and a phonetic component to specify the pronunciation. In the case of Chinese, the vast majority of characters are

1488-546: A series of printed Catholic books so that missionaries could preach and teach their converts without learning to read Japanese orthography. The most useful of these books for the study of early modern Japanese pronunciation and early attempts at romanization was the Nippo jisho , a Japanese–Portuguese dictionary written in 1603. In general, the early Portuguese system was similar to Nihon-shiki in its treatment of vowels . Some consonants were transliterated differently: for instance,

1581-549: A significant extent in writing even if they do not write in Standard Chinese . Therefore, in China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan before modern times, communication by writing ( 筆談 ) was the norm of East Asian international trade and diplomacy using Classical Chinese . This separation, however, also has the great disadvantage of requiring the memorization of the logograms when learning to read and write, separately from

1674-528: A sub-command known as British Commonwealth Occupation Force . These actions led MacArthur to be viewed as the new Imperial force in Japan by many Japanese political and civilian figures, even being considered to be the rebirth of the shōgun -style government which Japan was ruled under until the start of the Meiji Restoration . American biographer William Manchester argues that without MacArthur's leadership, Japan would not have been able to make

1767-881: A two-million-word sample. As for the case of traditional Chinese characters, 4,808 characters are listed in the " Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters " ( 常用國字標準字體表 ) by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China , while 4,759 in the " List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters " ( 常用字字形表 ) by the Education and Manpower Bureau of Hong Kong , both of which are intended to be taught during elementary and junior secondary education. Education after elementary school includes not as many new characters as new words, which are mostly combinations of two or more already learned characters. Entering complex characters can be cumbersome on electronic devices due to

1860-519: A violent backlash and revolution from the Japanese of all social classes, and this would interfere with his primary goal of changing Japan from a militarist, feudal society to a pro-Western modern democracy. In a cable sent to General Dwight Eisenhower in February 1946, MacArthur stated that executing or imprisoning the emperor would require the use of one million occupation soldiers to keep the peace. The relationship between Japanese leadership and SCAP

1953-449: Is (linearly) faster, it is more difficult to learn. With the Chinese alphabet system however, the strokes forming the logogram are typed as they are normally written, and the corresponding logogram is then entered. Also due to the number of glyphs, in programming and computing in general, more memory is needed to store each grapheme, as the character set is larger. As a comparison, ISO 8859 requires only one byte for each grapheme, while

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2046-400: Is a romanization system based on Japanese phonology, designed using the linguistic principles used by linguists in designing writing systems for languages that do not have any. It is a purely phonemic system, using exactly one symbol for each phoneme, and marking the pitch accent using diacritics . It was created for Eleanor Harz Jorden 's system of Japanese language teaching. Its principle

2139-426: Is a slightly modified version of Nihon-shiki which eliminates differences between the kana syllabary and modern pronunciation. For example, the characters づ and ず are pronounced identically in modern Japanese, and thus Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn ignore the difference in kana and represent the sound in the same way ( zu ). Nihon-shiki, on the other hand, will romanize づ as du , but ず as zu . Similarly for

2232-594: Is an example of an alphabetic script that was designed to replace the logogrammatic hanja in order to increase literacy. The latter is now rarely used, but retains some currency in South Korea, sometimes in combination with hangul. According to government-commissioned research, the most commonly used 3,500 characters listed in the People's Republic of China 's " Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese " ( 现代汉语常用字表 , Xiàndài Hànyǔ Chángyòngzì Biǎo ) cover 99.48% of

2325-410: Is called a logography . Non-logographic writing systems, such as alphabets and syllabaries , are phonemic : their individual symbols represent sounds directly and lack any inherent meaning. However, all known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle , and the addition of a phonetic component to pure ideographs is considered to be a key innovation in enabling

2418-400: Is extremely rare in Japan to use it to write Japanese (except as an input tool on a computer or for special purposes such as logo design), and most Japanese are more comfortable in reading kanji and kana. The earliest Japanese romanization system was based on Portuguese orthography . It was developed c.  1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Anjirō . Jesuit priests used the system in

2511-494: Is input. In addition, the following three "non-Hepburn rōmaji " ( 非ヘボン式ローマ字 , hi-Hebon-shiki rōmaji ) methods of representing long vowels are authorized by the Japanese Foreign Ministry for use in passports. This chart shows in full the three main systems for the romanization of Japanese: Hepburn , Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki : This chart shows the significant differences among them. Despite

2604-471: Is necessary before the stimulus can be disambiguated, and the correct pronunciation can be chosen. In contrast, in a language (such as Chinese) where many characters with the same reading exists, it is hypothesized that the person reading the character will be more familiar with homophones, and that this familiarity will aid the processing of the character, and the subsequent selection of the correct pronunciation, leading to shorter reaction times when attending to

2697-498: Is romanized as one word kekkonsuru by some authors but two words kekkon suru by others. There is no universally accepted style of romanization for the smaller versions of the vowels and y -row kana when used outside the normal combinations ( きゃ , きょ , ファ etc.), nor for the sokuon or small tsu kana っ/ッ when it is not directly followed by a consonant. Although these are usually regarded as merely phonetic marks or diacritics, they do sometimes appear on their own, such as at

2790-520: Is that such a system enables students to internalize the phonology of Japanese better. Since it does not have any of the other systems' advantages for non-native speakers, and the Japanese already have a writing system for their language, JSL is not widely used outside the educational environment. In addition to the standardized systems above, there are many variations in romanization, used either for simplification, in error or confusion between different systems, or for deliberate stylistic reasons. Notably,

2883-427: Is used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the phonetic domain is the syllable. In Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs , Ch'olti', and in Chinese, there has been the additional development of determinatives , which are combined with logograms to narrow down their possible meaning. In Chinese, they are fused with logographic elements used phonetically; such " radical and phonetic" characters make up

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2976-479: The /k/ consonant was rendered, depending on context, as either c or q , and the /ɸ/ consonant (now pronounced /h/ , except before u ) as f ; and so Nihon no kotoba ("The language of Japan") was spelled Nifon no cotoba . The Jesuits also printed some secular books in romanized Japanese, including the first printed edition of the Japanese classic The Tale of the Heike , romanized as Feiqe no monogatari , and

3069-519: The ASCII character set. While there may be arguments in favour of some of these variant romanizations in specific contexts, their use, especially if mixed, leads to confusion when romanized Japanese words are indexed. This confusion never occurs when inputting Japanese characters with a word processor, because input Latin letters are transliterated into Japanese kana as soon as the IME processes what character

3162-542: The Arab conquest of Persia and the adoption of a variant of the Arabic alphabet . All historical logographic systems include a phonetic dimension, as it is impractical to have a separate basic character for every word or morpheme in a language. In some cases, such as cuneiform as it was used for Akkadian, the vast majority of glyphs are used for their sound values rather than logographically. Many logographic systems also have

3255-540: The Basic Multilingual Plane encoded in UTF-8 requires up to three bytes. On the other hand, English words, for example, average five characters and a space per word and thus need six bytes for every word. Since many logograms contain more than one grapheme, it is not clear which is more memory-efficient. Variable-width encodings allow a unified character encoding standard such as Unicode to use only

3348-532: The International Phonetic Alphabet , the /j/ sound in や , ゆ , and よ are never romanized with the letter J . Japanese is written without spaces between words, and in some cases, such as compounds, it may not be completely clear where word boundaries should lie, resulting in varying romanization styles. For example, 結婚する , meaning "to marry", and composed of the noun 結婚 ( kekkon , "marriage") combined with する ( suru , "to do"),

3441-667: The JSDF are both hotly contested subjects of debates in modern Japanese politics, as pacifists see the JSDF and military involvement in foreign countries as unconstitutional, while nationalists seek Article 9 's removal and a wider rearmament of Japan. SCAP arrested 28 suspected war criminals on account of crimes against peace, but it did not conduct the Tokyo Trials; the International Military Tribunal for

3534-581: The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) made it official policy to romanize Japanese. However, that policy failed and a more moderate attempt at Japanese script reform followed. Hepburn romanization generally follows English phonology with Romance vowels. It is an intuitive method of showing Anglophones the pronunciation of a word in Japanese. It was standardized in the United States as American National Standard System for

3627-576: The Allied Powers ( 連合国軍最高司令官総司令部 , Rengōkokugun saikōshireikan sōshireibu , abbreviated as GHQ–SCAP ) ), including a staff of several hundred US civil servants as well as military personnel . Some of these personnel effectively wrote a first draft of the Japanese Constitution , which the National Diet then ratified after a few amendments. Australian , British Empire , and New Zealand forces under SCAP were organized into

3720-473: The Allied Powers, MacArthur also decided not to prosecute Shiro Ishii and all members of the bacteriological research units in exchange for germ warfare data based on human experimentation . On May 6, 1947, he wrote to Washington that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as "War Crimes" evidence." The deal

3813-523: The Emperor to issue statements that allowed for post war SCAP policy to be reframed as continued Meiji restoration , allowing the Emperor to cling to legitimacy. These views would be reflected in the first eight articles of the Constitution of Japan . A major land reform was conducted, led by Wolf Ladejinsky of MacArthur's SCAP staff; however, Ladejinsky himself stated that the true architect of

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3906-570: The Far East was responsible instead. President Harry Truman had negotiated Japanese surrender on the condition the Emperor would not be executed or put on trial. SCAP carried out that policy. As soon as November 26, 1945, MacArthur confirmed to Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai that the emperor's abdication would not be necessary. Before the war crimes trials actually convened, SCAP, the IPS and officials from Hirohito 's Shōwa government worked behind

3999-415: The Japanese from all social classes and this would interfere with his primary goal to change Japan from a militarist, feudal society to a pro-Western modern democracy. In a cable sent to General Dwight Eisenhower in February 1946 MacArthur said executing or imprisoning the emperor would require the use of one million occupation soldiers to keep the peace. Above the political and economic control SCAP had for

4092-469: The Japanese government, aiming to suppress its "militaristic nationalism". The position was created at the start of the occupation of Japan on August 14, 1945. It was originally styled the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers . In Japan, the position was generally referred to as GHQ ( General Headquarters ), as SCAP also referred to the offices of the occupation (which was officially referred by SCAP itself as General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for

4185-625: The May Day demonstrations went on. MacArthur stopped the Communist Party from gaining any popularity in Japan by releasing their members from prison, conducting landmark land reform for the rural Japanese farmers and peasants, and allowing the communists to freely participate in elections. In the 1946 election they won only 6 seats. MacArthur handed over power to the Japanese government in 1949, but remained in Japan until relieved by President Harry S. Truman on 11 April 1951, after which he

4278-490: The Old Chinese difference between type-A and type-B syllables (often described as presence vs. absence of palatalization or pharyngealization ); and sometimes, voicing of initial obstruents and/or the presence of a medial /r/ after the initial consonant. In earlier times, greater phonetic freedom was generally allowed. During Middle Chinese times, newly created characters tended to match pronunciation exactly, other than

4371-531: The Romanization of Japanese (Modified Hepburn) , but that status was abolished on October 6, 1994. Hepburn is the most common romanization system in use today, especially in the English-speaking world. The Revised Hepburn system of romanization uses a macron to indicate some long vowels and an apostrophe to note the separation of easily confused phonemes (usually, syllabic n ん from

4464-460: The SCAP staff of 150, Sams directed the welfare work of the American doctors, and organized entirely new Japanese medical welfare systems along American lines. The Japanese population was in a poor state: most people were badly worn down, doctors and medicines were very scarce, and sanitary systems had been bombed out in larger cities. Sams' earliest priorities were in distributing food supplies from

4557-676: The State Department on how to rule Korea, resulting in a tumultuous 3 year military occupation that led to the creation of the U.S.-friendly Republic of Korea in 1948. He ordered Lieutenant General John R. Hodge , who accepted the surrender of Japanese forces in southern Korea in September 1945, to govern that area on SCAP's behalf and report to him in Tokyo. SCAP is oftentimes synonymous with its appointed post war leader, American General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur ruled Japan with

4650-676: The United States military forces are still present in Japan today. They primarily function in a support role, providing defense for Japan and the surrounding region, per the agreements of the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty. The United States Forces Japan consists of around 50,000 service members deployed all over Japan to protect Japanese and US interests alike. This has led to tension at times between Japanese citizens and American servicemen, with incidents frequently occurring between locals and servicemen and crimes frequently committed by servicemen against locals, such as

4743-722: The United States. Millions of refugees from the defunct overseas empire were pouring in, often in bad physical shape, with a high risk of introducing smallpox , typhus and cholera . The outbreaks that did occur were localized, as emergency immunization, quarantine, sanitation, and delousing prevented massive epidemics. Sams, who was promoted to Brigadier General in 1948, worked with Japanese officials to establish vaccine laboratories, reorganize hospitals along American lines, upgrade medical and nursing schools, and bring together Japanese, international, and US teams that dealt with disasters, child care, and health insurance. He set up an Institute of Public Health for educating public health workers and

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4836-494: The adoption of Chinese characters by the Japanese and Korean languages (where they are known as kanji and hanja , respectively) have resulted in some complications to this picture. Many Chinese words, composed of Chinese morphemes, were borrowed into Japanese and Korean together with their character representations; in this case, the morphemes and characters were borrowed together. In other cases, however, characters were borrowed to represent native Japanese and Korean morphemes, on

4929-436: The basis of meaning alone. As a result, a single character can end up representing multiple morphemes of similar meaning but with different origins across several languages. Because of this, kanji and hanja are sometimes described as morphographic writing systems. Because much research on language processing has centered on English and other alphabetically written languages, many theories of language processing have stressed

5022-423: The bulk of the script. Ancient Egyptian and Chinese relegated the active use of rebus to the spelling of foreign and dialectical words. Logoconsonantal scripts have graphemes that may be extended phonetically according to the consonants of the words they represent, ignoring the vowels. For example, Egyptian was used to write both sȝ 'duck' and sȝ 'son', though it is likely that these words were not pronounced

5115-674: The bytes necessary to represent a character, reducing the overhead that results merging large character sets with smaller ones. Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers ( Japanese : 連合国軍最高司令官 , romanized :  Rengōkokugun saikōshireikan ), or SCAP , was the title held by General Douglas MacArthur during the United States -led Allied occupation of Japan following World War II . It issued SCAP Directives (alias SCAPIN, SCAP Index Number) to

5208-400: The character was created independently of other characters. "Single-body" pictograms and ideograms make up only a small proportion of Chinese logograms. More productive for the Chinese script were the two "compound" methods, i.e. the character was created from assembling different characters. Despite being called "compounds", these logograms are still single characters, and are written to take up

5301-471: The constitution to his officers, frustrated by the slowness of legislators. They would finish the task within a week, and presenting the new constitution as a wholesale amendment to the Meiji Constitution . It provided protections to the Emperor, placing him at the head of the state. It was ratified November of 1946 and went into effect May 3rd, 1947. It remains the oldest unamended constitution in

5394-403: The correct pronunciation. This hypothesis is confirmed by studies finding that Japanese Alzheimer's disease patients whose comprehension of characters had deteriorated still could read the words out loud with no particular difficulty. Studies contrasting the processing of English and Chinese homophones in lexical decision tasks have found an advantage for homophone processing in Chinese, and

5487-544: The day before the May Day celebrations, which would involve 300,000 Japanese communists demonstrating with red flags and pro-Marxism chants in front of the Tokyo Imperial Palace and the Dai-Ichi Building , a group of would-be assassins led by Hideo Tokayama that planned to assassinate MacArthur with hand grenades and pistols on May Day was stopped and some of its members arrested. Despite this plot

5580-444: The difference in latency in reading aloud Japanese and Chinese due to context effects cannot be ascribed to the logographic nature of the writing systems. Instead, the authors hypothesize that the difference in latency times is due to additional processing costs in Japanese, where the reader cannot rely solely on a direct orthography-to-phonology route, but information on a lexical-syntactical level must also be accessed in order to choose

5673-627: The early 20th century, some scholars devised syllabary systems with characters derived from Latin (rather like the Cherokee syllabary ) that were even less popular since they were not based on any historical use of the Latin script. Today, the use of Nihon-shiki for writing Japanese is advocated by the Oomoto sect and some independent organizations. During the Allied occupation of Japan , the government of

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5766-474: The end of sentences, in exclamations, or in some names. The detached sokuon, representing a final glottal stop in exclamations, is sometimes represented as an apostrophe or as t ; for example, あっ! might be written as a'! or at! . The list below shows the Japanese readings of letters in Katakana, for spelling out words, or in acronyms. For example, NHK is read enu-eichi-kē ( エヌ・エイチ・ケー ) . These are

5859-583: The end of the occupation. MacArthur legalized the Japanese Communist Party despite reservations from the United States government and invited them to take part in the 1946 election , which was also the first ever Japanese election to allow women to vote. He ordered the release of all political prisoners of the Imperial Japanese era, including communist prisoners. MacArthur approved the first May Day parade in 11 years in 1946. On

5952-548: The financial coalitions known as the Zaibatsu , which had previously monopolized industry. Eventually, looser industrial groupings known as Keiretsu evolved. The reforms alarmed many in the U.S. Departments of Defense and State, who believed they conflicted with the prospect of Japan and its industrial capacity as a bulwark against the spread of communism in Asia. Japan's hereditary peerage, called kazoku , that lasted for over

6045-787: The first five phases of the Bamum script . A peculiar system of logograms developed within the Pahlavi scripts (developed from the abjad of Aramaic ) used to write Middle Persian during much of the Sassanid period ; the logograms were composed of letters that spelled out the word in Aramaic but were pronounced as in Persian (for instance, the combination m-l-k would be pronounced "shah"). These logograms, called hozwārishn (a form of heterograms ), were dispensed with altogether after

6138-509: The land reform was Hiroo Wada  [ ja ] , then- Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries from the Japan Socialist Party . Between 1947 and 1949, approximately 4,700,000 acres (1,900,000 ha), or 38% of Japan's cultivated land, was purchased from the landlords under the government's reform program, and 4,600,000 acres (1,860,000 ha) was resold to the farmers who worked them. By 1950, 89% of all agricultural land

6231-699: The most widely used. Romanized Japanese may be used in any context where Japanese text is targeted at non-Japanese speakers who cannot read kanji or kana, such as for names on street signs and passports and in dictionaries and textbooks for foreign learners of the language. It is also used to transliterate Japanese terms in text written in English (or other languages that use the Latin script) on topics related to Japan, such as linguistics, literature, history, and culture. All Japanese who have attended elementary school since World War II have been taught to read and write romanized Japanese. Therefore, almost all Japanese can read and write Japanese by using rōmaji . However, it

6324-472: The move from an imperial, totalitarian state, to a democracy. At his appointment, MacArthur announced that he sought to "restore security, dignity and self-respect" to the Japanese people. MacArthur was also in charge of southern Korea from 1945 to 1948 due to the lack of clear orders or initiative from Washington, D.C. There was no plan or guideline given to MacArthur from the Joint Chiefs of Staff or

6417-583: The name vī , while Kōjien does. Logogram In a written language , a logogram (from Ancient Greek logos 'word', and gramma 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph , is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme . Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms, as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters in cuneiform script . A writing system that primarily uses logograms

6510-453: The name of the system would be rendered Kunreisiki . It is possible to elaborate these romanizations to enable non-native speakers to pronounce Japanese words more correctly. Typical additions include tone marks to note the Japanese pitch accent and diacritic marks to distinguish phonological changes, such as the assimilation of the moraic nasal /ɴ/ (see Japanese phonology ). JSL

6603-511: The older kw- pronunciation; in modern Hepburn romanization, this would be written Kaidan ( lit.   ' ghost tales ' ). In the Meiji era (1868–1912), some Japanese scholars advocated abolishing the Japanese writing system entirely and using rōmaji instead. The Nihon-shiki romanization was an outgrowth of that movement. Several Japanese texts were published entirely in rōmaji during this period, but it failed to catch on. Later, in

6696-704: The pair じ and ぢ , they are both zi in Kunrei-shiki and ji in Hepburn, but are zi and di respectively in Nihon-shiki. See the table below for full details. Kunrei-shiki has been standardized by the Japanese Government and the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 3602 . Kunrei-shiki is taught to Japanese elementary school students in their fourth year of education. Written in Kunrei-shiki,

6789-467: The practical compromise of standardizing how words are written while maintaining a nearly one-to-one relation between characters and sounds. Orthographies in some other languages, such as English , French , Thai and Tibetan , are all more complicated than that; character combinations are often pronounced in multiple ways, usually depending on their history. Hangul , the Korean language 's writing system,

6882-471: The pronunciation. Though not from an inherent feature of logograms but due to its unique history of development, Japanese has the added complication that almost every logogram has more than one pronunciation. Conversely, a phonetic character set is written precisely as it is spoken, but with the disadvantage that slight pronunciation differences introduce ambiguities. Many alphabetic systems such as those of Greek , Latin , Italian , Spanish , and Finnish make

6975-535: The role of hemispheric lateralization in orthographically versus phonetically coded languages. Another topic that has been given some attention is differences in processing of homophones. Verdonschot et al. examined differences in the time it took to read a homophone out loud when a picture that was either related or unrelated to a homophonic character was presented before the character. Both Japanese and Chinese homophones were examined. Whereas word production of alphabetically coded languages (such as English) has shown

7068-903: The role of phonology in producing speech. Contrasting logographically coded languages, where a single character is represented phonetically and ideographically, with phonetically/phonemically spelled languages has yielded insights into how different languages rely on different processing mechanisms. Studies on the processing of logographically coded languages have amongst other things looked at neurobiological differences in processing, with one area of particular interest being hemispheric lateralization. Since logographically coded languages are more closely associated with images than alphabetically coded languages, several researchers have hypothesized that right-side activation should be more prominent in logographically coded languages. Although some studies have yielded results consistent with this hypothesis there are too many contrasting results to make any final conclusions about

7161-708: The same amount of space as any other logogram. The final two types are methods in the usage of characters rather than the formation of characters themselves. The most productive method of Chinese writing, the radical-phonetic, was made possible by ignoring certain distinctions in the phonetic system of syllables. In Old Chinese , post-final ending consonants /s/ and /ʔ/ were typically ignored; these developed into tones in Middle Chinese , which were likewise ignored when new characters were created. Also ignored were differences in aspiration (between aspirated vs. unaspirated obstruents , and voiced vs. unvoiced sonorants);

7254-488: The same except for their consonants. The primary examples of logoconsonantal scripts are Egyptian hieroglyphs , hieratic , and demotic : Ancient Egyptian . Logosyllabic scripts have graphemes which represent morphemes, often polysyllabic morphemes, but when extended phonetically represent single syllables. They include cuneiform, Anatolian hieroglyphs , Cretan hieroglyphs , Linear A and Linear B , Chinese characters , Maya script , Aztec script , Mixtec script , and

7347-619: The scenes not only to prevent the imperial family being indicted, but also to slant the testimony of the defendants to ensure that no one implicated the Emperor. High officials in court circles and the Shōwa government collaborated with Allied GHQ in compiling lists of prospective war criminals , while the individuals arrested as Class A suspects and incarcerated in Sugamo Prison solemnly vowed to protect their sovereign against any possible taint of war responsibility. As Supreme Commander for

7440-604: The scripts, or if it merely reflects an advantage for languages with more homophones regardless of script nature, remains to be seen. The main difference between logograms and other writing systems is that the graphemes are not linked directly to their pronunciation. An advantage of this separation is that understanding of the pronunciation or language of the writer is unnecessary, e.g. 1 is understood regardless of whether it be called one , ichi or wāḥid by its reader. Likewise, people speaking different varieties of Chinese may not understand each other in speaking, but may do so to

7533-582: The seven years following Japan's surrender, SCAP also had strict control over all of the Japanese media, under the formation of the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) of SCAP. The CCD eventually banned a total of 31 topics from all forms of media. These topics included: Although some of the CCD censorship laws considerably relaxed towards the end of SCAP, some topics, like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were taboo until 1952 at

7626-554: The standard names, based on the British English letter names (so Z is from zed , not zee ), but in specialized circumstances, names from other languages may also be used. For example, musical keys are often referred to by the German names, so that B ♭ is called bē ( べー ) from German B ( German: [beː] ). Sources: Kōjien (7th edition), Daijisen (online version). Note: Daijisen does not mention

7719-424: The stimulus. In an attempt to better understand homophony effects on processing, Hino et al. conducted a series of experiments using Japanese as their target language. While controlling for familiarity, they found a processing advantage for homophones over non-homophones in Japanese, similar to what has previously been found in Chinese. The researchers also tested whether orthographically similar homophones would yield

7812-787: The tone – often by using as the phonetic component a character that itself is a radical-phonetic compound. Due to the long period of language evolution, such component "hints" within characters as provided by the radical-phonetic compounds are sometimes useless and may be misleading in modern usage. As an example, based on 每 'each', pronounced měi in Standard Mandarin , are the characters 侮 'to humiliate', 悔 'to regret', and 海 'sea', pronounced respectively wǔ , huǐ , and hǎi in Mandarin. Three of these characters were pronounced very similarly in Old Chinese – /mˤəʔ/  (每), /m̥ˤəʔ/  (悔), and /m̥ˤəʔ/  (海) according to

7905-399: The various mappings that Japanese input methods use to convert keystrokes on a Roman keyboard to kana often combine features of all of the systems; when used as plain text rather than being converted, these are usually known as wāpuro rōmaji . ( Wāpuro is a blend of wā do puro sessā word processor .) Unlike the standard systems, wāpuro rōmaji requires no characters from outside

7998-448: The world. The most polarizing aspect of the Japanese constitution, a part that still sees debate to this day, is the presence of Article 9 , a clause covering the status of the Japanese military. The clause outlaws belligerency and prohibits the establishment of organized armed forces by the government. Despite this, Japan maintains a " self defense force " (a de facto defensive military) of around 250,000 active personnel. Article 9 and

8091-489: The writing system to adequately encode human language. Logographic systems include the earliest writing systems; the first historical civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica used some form of logographic writing. All logographic scripts ever used for natural languages rely on the rebus principle to extend a relatively limited set of logograms: A subset of characters is used for their phonetic values, either consonantal or syllabic. The term logosyllabary

8184-543: Was concluded in 1948. According to historian Herbert Bix in Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan , "MacArthur's truly extraordinary measures to save the Emperor from trial as a war criminal had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war." MacArthur's reasoning was if the emperor were executed or sentenced to life imprisonment there would be a violent backlash and revolution from

8277-402: Was concluded in 1948. According to historian Herbert Bix in Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan , "MacArthur's truly extraordinary measures to save the Emperor from trial as a war criminal had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war." MacArthur's reasoning was that if the emperor were executed or sentenced to life imprisonment there would be

8370-467: Was originally invented as a method for Japanese to write their own language in Latin characters, rather than to transcribe it for Westerners as Hepburn was. It follows the Japanese syllabary very strictly, with no adjustments for changes in pronunciation. It has also been standardized as ISO 3602 Strict . Also known as Nippon-shiki , rendered in the Nihon-shiki style of romanization the name is either Nihon-siki or Nippon-siki . Kunrei-shiki romanization

8463-493: Was owner-operated and only 11% was tenant-operated. MacArthur's efforts to encourage trade union membership met with phenomenal success, and by 1947, 48% of the non-agricultural workforce was unionized. Some of MacArthur's reforms were rescinded in 1948 when his unilateral control of Japan was ended by the increased involvement of the State Department. During the Occupation, SCAP successfully, if not entirely, abolished many of

8556-658: Was succeeded as SCAP by General Matthew Ridgway . The San Francisco Peace Treaty , signed on 8 September 1951, marked the end of the Allied occupation, and when it went into effect on 28 April 1952, Japan was once again an independent state. The position of SCAP was effectively abolished on 1 July 1957 with the disbandment of the Far East Command . However, the United States continued to administer some Japanese islands after that with, for example, Okinawa being continually under US administration until 1972. All branches of

8649-407: Was tense, as SCAP domineered the former on the path to post war reconstruction. MacArthur was focused on the task at hand, shown by his refusal to address the Japanese leadership or public directly, instead electing to go straight to and from his office every day, without stops. MacArthur and SCAP were adamant that the Emperor especially be shielded from responsibility for the war. MacArthur allowed

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