Ontological and quantitative analyses of the kokuji characters of the Japanese writing system

Abstract

Except its two kana syllabaries and the Latin alphabet, the Japanese writing system is mainly based on Chinese characters and local, made-in-Japan characters. While the former, called kanji characters, are ubiquitous in Japanese, the latter, called kokuji characters, remain largely unknown and thus infrequently used. It is then meaningful and interesting to investigate these local characters, and that in a global manner, that is considering them as a whole rather than focusing on particular instances such as often done in previous works. To this end, in this paper we first conduct a formal, ontological discussion of the kokuji characters so as to identify common properties and patterns, and second we realise a quantitative analysis thereof according to several criteria. The obtained results clearly exhibit trends, which are subsequently discussed.