Cybernetic Language

196 kanji are being added to the official list for common use (and five removed), due to a bunch of new objects being more common nowadays.

Here's how Japanese writing works (skip to the section break if you know this): there are two syllabaries - Hiragana and Kana, which are mostly interchangeable, though one is more frequently used for loan words from other languages - and one ideograph set - the Kanji, Chinese characters.

A syllabary is like an alphabet, except each mark corresponds to a syllable rather than a sound (or set of sounds, in English and similarly benighted tongues).  So there are "letters" that mean "na" and "bo" and "o" and "gu" and so forth.  There are a couple dozen, modified by diacritical marks and duplicated in the two systems.

Ideographs are like hieroglyphics: symbols or images of varying levels of abstraction that have a specific meaning.  Three birds might mean summer.  A crocodile under water means danger.  So there are "words" that mean "five" and "boy" and "motion as a wave" and so forth.  Of course, these words are sometimes pronounced aloud, but unlike with alphabet or syllabary writing systems, their written form gives no clue as to how they're pronounced, and vice versa.  Thus, there are many different spoken languages in China that use the character set that the Japanese call Kanji, and everyone pronounces them differently.  In fact, most Kanji have at least two completely different ways of pronunciation just in Japanese!  Imagine if the word for baseball could either be pronounced "baseball" or "coriander," and you're getting the idea.

These systems are not entirely separate: they feed into one another.  Every possible pronunciation of every Kanji can be spelled phonetically in Hiragana.  And that's how Japanese word processors were made to work.

So endeth that lesson.  People skipping may resume reading here, please.

No keyboard could contain all the Kanji.  There are a few thousand on the "official list for common use" alone, and tens of thousands of more specialized ones for engineering and religious rituals and more besides.  So instead, they have the Kana, which you use to type words phonetically.  And then the computer will guess what Kanji you're trying to type (if any), and present it to you as an drop-down option.  So you spell everything out, but the proper characters are inserted for you.

So to make it clear: before the first working Japanese word processor could be made, they had to, repeat, had to write an autocomplete function, and every single one after that has included it.  Without what we think of as the mixed luxury/drudge of as-you-type spell check, Kanji would be rapidly becoming a historical footnote, used only in newspapers no one reads and art that everyone patriotically appreciates but doesn't really understand.

So now, everyone know how to read Kanji, but no one has to write them.  Japanese folks are living in an age of computer-mediated literacy, way beyond our problems of no one knowing how to spell "independent" correctly without an animated paper clip telling them.