Asahi sign

The so-called Asahi characters ( Japanese 朝日 文字 , Asahi moji ) are special forms of Kanji , as introduced by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper and used almost exclusively by it.

During the Japanese writing reform in 1946, the shapes of numerous Chinese characters were simplified ( Shinjitai ), among other things to make learning the Japanese script easier and to make characters more recognizable when they are printed in small font sizes. An example are the characters for economy, keizai , which have been shortened from 經濟 to 経 済 . The list of simplifications published by the Japanese Ministry of Education, however, only affected a selection of 1850 characters, the Tōyō Kanji . Characters outside this list, the so-called Hyōgaiji ( 表 外 字 ), on the other hand, were left in the old form ( Kyūjitai ), even if they consisted of elements that were simplified in the Tōyō Kanji. In the Asahi Shimbun, however, all signs that contained such simplified elements were fundamentally simplified.

For example, the characters 齊 , 齋 , 劑, and 濟 found on the Tōyō kanji list have been simplified to 斉 , 斎 , 剤, and 済 . Sign outside this list with the same element ( 齊 ), for example 臍 , 纃 and 薺 however, have not simplified. The character 臍 ( heso , "belly button") is printed in the Asahi Shimbun as ? ( 月 斉 ), 齟齬 ( sogo , "contradiction, conflict") as ? ? ( 歯 且 歯 吾 ).

In addition to the implementation in Unicode (especially in the Unicode block Unified CJK ideograms, extension B ), some of these characters have also been included in Japanese fonts from JIS X 0208 . Some of the Asahi characters have become the de facto standard, firstly because they can be displayed better at low screen resolutions, and secondly because they were implemented before the original shapes. An example of this is 鹸 ken in 石 鹸 ( sekken , "soap"), the kyūjitai form of which aufgenommen was later included in the standard. The character 葛 ( kuzu ) has caused some controversy because only the simplified character was included in the JIS standard, the original 葛 using 曷 as the lower element. Protests came from localities that have the symbol in their name, such as the Katsushika district of Tokyo ( 葛 飾 区 , -ku ), and from people whose names are spelled with this symbol.

Other newspapers are also considering how to apply the consequent simplification of radical 162 from 辶 to 辶 and from 113 示 to 礻 to all signs in the Asahi Shimbun .