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영어

This paper examines the changes in educational kanji created after World War II and their historical background. Japan’s kanji restriction policy, which has been discussed since the Meiji era, has not been concretely implemented in the first half of the 20th century, although some policy decisions were made. In November 1946, the Toyo Kanji(kanji for general use at the time and are today) list, which can be said to be the beginning of full-scale Kanji restrictions, was created, and two years later, in February 1948, the Toyo Kanji Beppyo(basic requirement kanji = educational kanji(Kyoiku Kanji)) list was created to specify the kanji to be learned in the compulsory education course. After that, the concept of list of kanji by school year was created. At first, the total number of characters for elementary and junior high school students was 881, but only for elementary schools, and after 996 characters and 1006 characters, it became 1026 characters from 2020. The reason for the establishment of Kyoiku Kanji in 1948 is that it is very difficult from the original purpose of reducing the burden of learning Kanji and improving the content of education. While the need for learning Japanese was emphasized from a linguistic and cultural point of view, the number of Kyoiku kanji gradually increased. Under these circumstances, no concrete efforts have been made to verify how much the Japanese’s ability to read and write Japanese has improved. There is no way to confirm what has changed from the results of the 1948 and 1955 literacy surveys conducted immediately after World War II.