Psychological Research (2017) 81:696–708
DOI 10.1007/s00426-016-0764-3

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

www.kanjidatabase.com: a new interactive online databasefor psychological and linguistic research on Japanese kanji
and their compound words
Katsuo Tamaoka1 · Shogo Makioka2 · Sander Sanders3 · Rinus G. Verdonschot4

Received: 21 July 2015 / Accepted: 24 February 2016 / Published online: 16 March 2016
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016

Abstract Most experimental research making use of theJapanese language has involved the 1945 officially standardized kanji (Japanese logographic characters) in theJōyō kanji list (originally announced by the Japanese
government in 1981). However, this list was extensively
modified in 2010: five kanji were removed and 196 kanji
were added; the latest revision of the list now has a total of2136 kanji. Using an up-to-date corpus consisting of
11 years’ worth of articles printed in the Mainichi Newspaper (2000–2010), we have constructed two novel
databases that can be used in psychological research using
the Japanese language: (1) a database containing a wide
variety of properties on the latest 2136 Jōyō kanji, and (2) anovel database containing 27,950 two-kanji compoundwords (or jukugo). Based on these two databases, we havecreated an interactive website (www.kanjidatabase.com) toretrieve and store linguistic information to be used in
psychological and linguistic experiments. The present
paper reports the most important characteristics for the new
databases, as well as their value for experimental psychological and linguistic research.

& Rinus G. Verdonschot
rinusverdonschot@gmail.com
1

Graduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya
University, Nagoya, Japan

2

Osaka Prefecture University, Sakai, Japan

3

Kumulus Centre, Maastricht, The Netherlands

4

Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS), Waseda
University, 1-6-1 Nishi Waseda, Shinjuku-ku,
Tokyo 169-8050, Japan

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Introduction
Logographic scripts (used in Japanese and Chinese) have
many properties making them attractive to investigate
matters that would be difficult to research using alphabetic
scripts. For example, logographs are able to convey a
particular meaning directly without involving phonology.
To date, there has been a long tradition in psychologicalresearch that involved the usage of logographic scripts on avariety of topics, such as: dyslexia (e.g. Frith, 1981), word
reading (e.g. Yamada, Mitarai, & Yoshida, 1991), sentence
processing (e.g. Wang, Verdonschot, & Yang, 2016),
memory (e.g. Chen, Cheung, Lau, 1997; Le Bigot,
Passerault, & Olive, 2009), stroop tasks (e.g. Luo, &Proctor, 2013), visual perception (e.g. Ono, & Kawahara,2008) and perception–action coupling (e.g. Yu, Gong, Qiu,
& Zhou, 2011). In most research, when constructing
experimental materials, important information needs to becollected, for instance to make sure that experimental
conditions are balanced or certain requirements are met.
To aid this process, the current paper reports the availability of two novel (and freely available) databases which
provide fellow–researchers, especially those who plan to
use the Japanese language in their experiments, with aneasy-to-access means to control and manipulate important
lexical factors to conduct high-quality research. The main
highlights of these new databases are that they are based ona recent corpus and reflect the new Jōyō-kanji list that was
introduced by the Japanese government in 2010. Additionally, we provide an online tool that allows for an easy
lookup and usage of these databases (www.kanjidatabase.
com). This paper is organized in the following way: first we
give a brief overview on Japanese kanji characters andpresent some of the currently available databases, then we
introduce the new databases, point out how each of thePsychological Research (2017) 81:696–708

variables in the current database were calculated, whilst
specifying how these particular measures are important inexperimental psychological and linguistic research.

What are Japanese kanji?
Kanji are logographic characters (originating from Chinese) that have been adopted over time into the Japanese
language. In modern Japanese texts, kanji are typicallycombined with two other scripts (hiragana and katakana) toform the Japanese writing system. Although there are many
content words that are preferably written in hiragana or
katakana, typically kanji characters are used to convey thebasic meaning of an utterance. For example, in a sentencesuch as “彼はその理論について論文を書いた” meaning“he wrote an article on the theory” the kanji in the sentence(i.e., 彼 “he”, 理論 “theory”, 論文 “article” and 書 “towrite”) contain the meaning and the other script (onlyhiragana in this case) plays a grammatical role (case/tense
marking). When two kanji combine to form words such as
理論 “theory” and 論文 “article” they are called jukugo(meaning two-kanji compound words).
Although the largest Japanese dictionaries list the existence of over 50,000 kanji (e.g. Morohashi, 2000), it isgenerally thought that about 4000 kanji are used in daily
life. To provide an official standard for printed texts, theJapanese government established a list of commonly-usedkanji in 1981 which contained 1945 basic Japanese kanji
characters (called the Jōyō kanji-list). Since then this list
has been used as the standard for Japanese texts including
newspapers, magazines, educational materials andresearch. In 2010, however, the official Jōyō kanji list was
extensively revised. Five kanji were removed, and 196
kanji were added (±9 % change). The creation of this newlist represents the official adjustment for changed kanji
usage over time in modern Japanese and now includes a
total of 2136 kanji to serve as the foundation forJapanese written texts. Obviously, this has consequences
when selecting stimuli for experimental psychological andlinguistic research making use of the Japanese language.

Existing Japanese kanji databases
Various papers report to have employed the (now sold out)
kanji database developed by Amano and Kondo (1999,
2000), otherwise known as the NTT database (which costed about 750 USD). This database was created based on a
corpus of Asahi Newspaper articles, published between
1985 and 1998. Although it is well constructed, it is likelythat databases based on more recent corpora (such as thecurrent Mainichi Shimbun corpus) are more representative697

of modern Japanese. In addition, the NTT database
employed morphological parsing software called sumomo,which, according to the the authors, elicits segmentation
parsing error rates around 10 % (Amano, & Kondo, 2000).
In comparison, the new database(s) reported in this paper
utilized a newer morphological parsing program called
MeCab (Kudo, Yamamoto, & Matsumoto 2004) with asegmentation accuracy around 98.96 % (or an error rate of
1.04 %).1
Another regularly used database (see e.g. Jincho, Feng,& Mazuka, 2014) is the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary
Written Japanese (BCCWJ)2 by Maekawa et al., (2014)
which was generated from a corpus covering a wide rangeof materials including books, magazines and newspapers.
Although there is free access in the form of the simple“shonagon” online search option (which also provides
word frequency) other access plans to the database (e.g.
chuunagon or DVD versions) are not free and costs dependon the specific license type. The total number of words
contained in the BCCWJ is 104.6 million; which is lessthan a half of the corpus source used for the databasespresented in this paper (299.6 million). The sub-corpus of
the newspaper in BCCWJ covers the period of 2001–2005.
The last database we would like to mention is the freely
available kanji database by Tamaoka and Makioka (2004).
The fourth edition (published in 2004) included several
novel mathematical indexes such as kanji entropy, redundancy and symmetry and is downloadable as an Excel, Wordor PDF file (https://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/ktamaoka/en/). This database has been amply used in psychologicalresearch on the Japanese language (e.g. Hino, Miyamura, &Lupker, 2011; Miwa, Libben, & Baayen, 2012; Miwa, Libben, Dijkstra, & Baayen, 2014; Toyoda, 2009; Verdonschot,
La Heij, Tamaoka, Kiyama, You, & Schiller 2013). However, considering the recent change in the Jōyō-kanji list,
also this database would need to reflect this change and it
would benefit to be based on a more recent corpus as well.
The new Jōyō Kanji and Jukugo Databases
This paper presents the availability of two freely accessible
databases: (1) a Jōyō kanji database (partially based on
Tamaoka and Makioka 2004) and (2) a jukugo database,allowing for improved control and manipulation ofimportant lexical factors when conducting psychologicaland linguistic research using Japanese kanji. We will now
describe their properties and specific usage for psychological and linguistic research in more detail. Bothdatabases can be freely accessed through a web interface at
1

For details, see https://mecab.sourceforge.net.
See http://www.ninjal.ac.jp/english/products/bccwj/ for an English
explanation.

2

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www.kanjidatabase.com. The manual on how to use thiswebsite can be found under the heading “manual”.
Description of the Jōyō kanji database
The corpus used in constructing the Jōyō kanji database
To create the current 2136 Jōyō kanji database, we used
11 years’ worth of articles from the Mainichi Newspaper,
beginning in 2000 and ending in 2010. The morphologicalparsing program MeCab (Kudo, Yamamoto, & Matsumoto,2004) totaled 477,264 morphological units (type frequency), and a total token frequency of 299,695,840 out of
this newspaper corpus (including proper nouns; such as 日
産 “Nissan” or 佐藤 “Sato”). Excluding proper nouns, thecount was 368,841 for type frequency and 282,816,611 fortoken frequency. Using the Mainichi Newspaper corpus,
the present kanji database lists the frequencies for each of
the 2136 commonly-used Jōyō kanji. In the following
subsections we will now briefly describe each property
stored in the database in the order they appear in the lookup function on the www.kanjidatabase.com website and,
where necessary, elaborate on their usefulness in experimental psychological and linguistic research.
Strokes (visual complexity)
Kanji strokes refer to the number of brush strokes required
to draw a specific kanji. The numbers stored in the databaseare based on the “Teaching Guides for Kanji Stroke Order”
provided in 1958 by the Japanese government (see Horiguchi, 1989). The number of strokes as an index of kanji
visual complexity has been shown to exhibit inhibitory
effects, indicated by studies on Chinese (Leong, Cheng, &Mulcahy, 1987) and Japanese characters (Tamaoka, &Takahashi, 1999; Tamaoka, & Kiyama, 2013). Leong et al.
(1987) found that three major factors influence the processing of logographic characters: (1) orthography, (2)printed frequency, and (3) reading ability. Less visuallycomplex characters were processed faster than those withgreater visual complexity (when controlled for printedfrequency and reading ability). However, complex lowfrequency characters were processed particularly slowly byless-skilled readers.
Tamaoka and Takahashi (1999) investigated initiation
times of drawing two-kanji compound words (jukugo) thatwere phonetically presented to native Japanese speakers.
The initiation time refers to the duration between the time
when a participant heard a target two-kanji compound
word and the time when the participant started drawing theleft-side kanji of the two-kanji compound. This study
indicated that there were inhibitory effects of initiation
times for visually complex kanji for low frequency kanji

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while high frequency kanji showed no effects. Likewise,
Tamaoka and Kiyama (2013) showed that visually complex kanji with low frequency elicited a heavier cognitive
load within single kanji processing. Because visual complexity is an important factor when recognizing kanji (seealso: Higuchi, Moriguchi, Murakami, Katsunuma, Mishima, & Uno, 2016), stroke counts must be controlled for
conditions within experiments involving kanji.
Grade (age of acquisition)
Attaining kanji competence is much more difficult thanlearning the other two Japanese scripts, katakana andhiragana. Uno, Wydell, Haruhara, Kaneko and Shinya(2009) identified rates of developmental dyslexia among
495 students from elementary school grades two to six inJapan. They reported the rates of developmental dyslexia
as the percentage of the students whose reading andwriting scores of hiragana, katakana and kanji fell below
the 1.5 standard deviation cut-off. According to this criterion, students displayed difficulty (i.e., those who werebeyond the cut-off criterion) in pronouncing (reading)hiragana at 0.2 %, katakana at 1.4 %, and kanji at 6.9 %,while they showed similar difficulties in writing-hiragana
at 1.6 %, katakana at 3.8 %, and kanji at 6.0 %. Thisshows that kanji can be a major obstacle for students at
the elementary school level. Additionally, it has repeatedly been shown that words learned earlier in life can berecognized and produced faster than those learned in laterin life, all other factors being equal. This phenomenon isoften referred to as the age of acquisition (AoA) Effect.
The AoA effect on lexical processing is believed to be
independent from frequency effects (e.g. Barry, Morrison,& Ellis, 1997; Barry, Hirsh, Johnston, & Williams, 2001;
Morrison, & Ellis, 2000). Since the AoA for a particularword is often determined by asking speakers subjective(and difficult to answer) questions (e.g.: “When did you
acquire the word \X[?”) grade-allocations from grades 1
to 6 for Japanese kanji may serve better as an objective
measurement of AoA. The outline of the Japanese language curriculum was released by the Japanese Ministryof Education in 1989 and included a list (called gakushū
kanji) containing 1006 kanji taught to students between
grades one and six. According to the list, 80 kanji aretaught in grade one, 160 kanji are taught in grade two,
200 kanji in grade three, 200 kanji in grade four, 185
kanji in grade five, and 181 kanji in grade six. All thesekanji are included in the Jōyō Kanji List. The remaining
1130 kanji are taught in grades 7–9. Since Japanese citizens are obliged to take part in school at least throughgrade nine, it is reasonable to assume that all 2136 Jōyō
kanji are acquired by adult native Japanese speakers
educated in Japan.

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Kanji classiﬁcation
Many people believe logographic characters to be predominantly pictographic (e.g. 木 “a tree”). However, such
pictographic kanji (Shookei), only comprise 269 kanji(12.6 %) of the Jōyō Kanji List. The majority of kanji(approximately 60 % of the Jōyō Kanji List) are classified
as semantic-phonetic composites (Keisei). The next largest
classification is semantic composites (Kaii). These are 532
kanji on the Jōyō Kanji list (24.9 %). The most common
classification for kanji is called the Rikusho Bunrui or “SixClassifications of Chinese Characters” (for details see:
Chikamatsu, 2005; Tamaoka, Kirsner, Yanase, Miyaoka, &Kawakami, 2002 in English; Atsuji, 1988 in Japanese).
Values in the database follow the system described by
Shirakawa (1994) namely: pictographic (象形), ideographic (指事), compound ideographic (会意), phonetic(形声), loan (仮借) and derivative cognate (転注). In
addition to these six standard classifications, the current
database also includes a new seventh classification,
namely, Japanese-original kanji (i.e., not originally Chinese), termed original (国字; 6 kanji, 0.28 %) for example
峠 (“mountain pass”). Classification frequencies provide
useful figures, for instance when one needs to work with aparticular kanji class (i.e., pictographs, or compound
ideographs).
The Japanese Language Proﬁciency test (JLPT-test)
The Japanese Language Proficiency Test (hereafter JLPT)
for non-native Japanese speakers has been prepared andadministered by both the Japan Foundation and the Japan
Association of International Education since 1984. As
many as 750,000 people took the JLPT in 2009 alone. The
highest level is one and the lowest level is four. Although
recently the JLPT has been altered to contain five levels(N1–N5); updated kanji lists for the new levels are notprovided, therefore we report only the previous levels (1–4)
for which official lists are available. Japanese language
education, especially outside of Japan, focuses on teaching
kanji used in the official JLPT kanji list, as many students
who learn Japanese aim to pass the JLPT test(s).
There is a high correlation (r = −0.67; p \ .001)
between the grade in which native Japanese children study
particular kanji and when those kanji appear in the JLPT
prescribed curriculum. The crosstab (containing the 1006
elementary school kanji) across elementary school gradeand JLPT levels is shown in Table 1. All 1006 kanji taught
in grades one to six are included in JLPT levels four to one.
As depicted in Table 1, many kanji taught at the forth(lowest) level of JLPT are also taught in grades one andtwo. Kanji taught in grades five and grade six are allocatedto the second and first (highest) levels of the JLPT. The

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correlation is negative since the difficulty levels arereversed in JLPT, ranging from the easiest (fourth) level tothe hardest (first) level. In research JLPT levels are typically used to control difficulties of lexical items whenparticipants are non-native speakers (e.g. Komori,Tamaoka, Saito, & Miyaoka, 2014; Tanaka, 2015; Yamato,& Tamaoka, 2013).
Name of radical
Kanji are classified in dictionaries according to their main
components called radicals. Radicals can be categorized
into seven main groups according to their position within akanji (hen = left, tsukuri = right, kanmuri = on top,ashi = at the bottom, tare = left bottom, go up, go to right
top, nyō = left top, down, to right bottom, kamae = enclose like a square). Conversely, kanji dictionaries often
use the 214 radical classifications derived from the Chinese
Kangxi radicals. These radicals often may give a clue to themeaning or the pronunciation of a kanji (e.g. Leong, &Tamaoka, 1995; Saito, Masuda, & Kawakami, 1998, 1999;
Saito, Yamazaki, & Masuda, 2002; Verdonschot et al.,2013). For example, kanji containing the semantic radical
虫 (mushi; “insect”) typically represent an insect (e.g. 蜂“bee”, 蛍 “firefly”) although there are exceptions (e.g. 蛇“snake” and 虹 “rainbow”). Additionally, kanji containing
包 (“hoo”) such as: 抱, 泡, 胞, 砲, 飽, 咆 mostly sound like“hoo”, though this only holds for the (Chinese derived).
On-reading and even then only in a selected number ofcases. Importantly, kanji radicals have been shown to
independently contribute to naming (Flores d’Arcais, Saito,& Kawakami, 1995), semantic classification (Flores d’Arcais, & Saito, 1993) and lexical decision latencies (Miwaet al., 2012). For instance, the latter authors observed
semantic radical effects which were separate from wholeword and individual kanji frequency effects in processing
jukugo.
The current database reports the name of the radical
found in each kanji (see Kaiho, & Nomura, 1983; Kess, &Miyamoto, 1999) taken from the radical classification
found in the New Nelson’s Japanese–English Character
Dictionary (Haig, 1997). For instance, if one would like toobtain all the kanji with the insect radical one would type
“mushi” at this field when looking in the database.
Radical frequency
Radical frequency refers to the number of kanji in the
database sharing the same radical. The top 20 radicals
encompass 1132 kanji (or 53.0 %) in the list suggesting thata small number of radicals are frequently used to construct
the majority of kanji. It should be noted that the radical
frequencies might depend to a certain extent on the way

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kanji are classified in a dictionary, although potentialchanges per dictionary in frequency should be minimal.
Reading within Jōyō
Japanese kanji readings have two ways of reading them,
namely: On-readings (derived from Chinese), which are
typically associated with sounds, and Kun-readings (original Japanese words), which are typically associated withmeanings. Some kanji with On-readings are semanticallytransparent, but this is quite rare. On-readings are mostcommon within two-kanji compound words. Conversely,
Kun-readings are native to Japanese, and usually carry aclear meaning. Most Japanese kanji (over 62 %) have morethan one pronunciation. For instance, the kanji 下 for“below”, “down” can be pronounced in six different ways
in Kun-readings, with inflections as shita, shimo, moto, sa(geru/garu), kuda(su/saru), o(rosu/riru), and two different
ways in On-reading, as ka and ge.
The Jōyō kanji list provides all Kun-readings, including
inflections of verbs and adjectives. Researchers interested
in the effect of the number of sounds in a single kanji
should look at the number of Kun-readings without
inflections. To meet this need, the present kanji databasealso provides Kun-readings without inflections. Although
the number of On- and Kun-readings is specified in theJōyō kanji list, there are rare additional readings for many
kanji (e.g. one of Kun-readings, /kururi/ for 転). To
accommodate this, two different calculations in both thenumber of pronunciations as well as frequencies are provided in the kanji database termed “within the Jōyō kanjilist” and “beyond the Jōyō kanji list” for each of On- andKun-reading.
Table 2 shows the numbers of kanji, a crosstab
between On- and Kun-readings according to the pronunciations specified in the Jōyō kanji list. It, however,excludes overlapping Kun-readings by inflections (Kunreadings are counted without inflections). According toTable 2, 812 kanji, or 38.0 %, only have a single pronunciation, that is: either an On-reading or a Kun-reading.
The total number of kanji with multiple On- or Kunreading is 1324; this stems from the original 2136 kanji
minus 69 kanji with a single Kun-reading and 743 with asingle On-reading (i.e., 2136 − 69 − 743 = 1324). In
other words, after excluding multiple On-readings or Kunreadings, 1324 kanji, or 62.0 %, out of the 2136 kanji
have more than one pronunciation. Reading within Jōyō
refers to the readings specified in the official Jōyō list. For
instance, four readings for the kanji 幸 “happiness” areprovided in the list, one On-reading /koo/, and three Kunreadings, namely: /saiwa(i)/, /satyi/ and /siawa(se)/.

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Reading beyond Jōyō
The Jōyō kanji list provides only commonly-used readings.
The previous example of 幸 ‘happiness’ also has an additional Kun-reading, /miyuki/, which is not listed. To cover
all available readings, the present database used the Kanjigen Kaitei Dai-5-ban [Kanji Sources Revised Fifth Version] (Todo, 2010) which is an often used and up-to-datesource. Thus, reading beyond Jōyō refers to any reading
not provided in the Jōyō kanji list, but included in the kanji
dictionary.
# of On and On within Jōyō
An On-reading refers to a pronunciation taken from a
Chinese original sound whereas a Kun-reading refers to apronunciation of an original Japanese sound. Japanese
kanji often has multiple readings. For example, the kanji 家‘house’ has two On-readings (i.e. /ka/ and /ke/) and two
Kun-readings (i.e., /i.e./ and /ya/) in the Jōyō kanji list. In
the case of 家, the number of On-reading (# of On) is
counted as 2. Thus, the On-readings for 家 within the list
(On within Joyo) are/ka/and/ke/.
Kanji ID in Nelson
The New Nelson’s Japanese–English Character Dictionary(Haig, 1997) is based on the Japanese–English Character
Dictionary by Nelson (1962) and is prevalent within
Japanese academic circles around the world. This dictionary contains 7107 kanji entries, each labeled with anentry number. For example, the kanji 貝 (kai, ‘seashell’) is
numbered as 5766 in this dictionary. Kanji can be found byfollowing the sequential numbering of the dictionary, andstudents can additionally look up the usages for compoundwords like 貝殻 (kaigara, ‘seashell’).
# of meanings of On
This parameter refers to the number of meanings associatedwith an On-reading (Chinese derived reading). A single
On-reading occasionally has multiple meanings. For
instance, the kanji 脳 is pronounced as noo in its Onreading. This is the only On-reading in this kanji, so thenumber of On-reading (# of On) is 1, and noo is the only
On-reading listed in the Jōyō kanji list (On within Jōyō).
However, associated with this On-reading, 脳 has twomeanings, specifically: ‘brain’ and ‘memory’ according to
the new Nelson’s dictionary (Haig, 1997). Thus, # of
meanings of On is 2. Thus, the English translations of the
On-readings (Translation of On) are ‘brain’ and ‘memory’.

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701# of Kun within Jōyō with inﬂections

Kanji frequency with proper nouns

The Japanese-original readings for kanji are called Kunreadings. These kanji are often used as the stem of a verb or
an adjective, to which inflectional affixes can be added. In
the Jōyō kanji list, the kanji 歌 representing ‘a song’ or ‘tosing’ can be either a noun, uta; or a verb, uta(u), which has
the verbal inflectional affix—u. Therefore, the number of
Kun-readings within the Jōyō kanji list with inflections (#of Kun within Jōyō with inflections) for this kanji (歌) is
assessed to be 2; once for the noun of uta and once for theverb uta(u). When the inflection—u is removed, the Kunreading is the same for both the noun and the verb, uta. The
number of Kun-readings within the Jōyō kanji list without
inflections (# of Kun within Jōyō without inflections) is
counted only uta, and thus, the number of Kun-readings is
1.

Lexical frequency has been repeatedly observed to be astrong factor influencing lexical processing (e.g. Balota, &Spieler, 1999; Brown, & Rubenstein, 1961; Gordon, 1983;
Hino, & Lupker, 1998; Jescheniak, & Levelt, 1994; Segui,
Mehler, Frauenfelder, & Morton, 1982; Starreveld, La
Heij, & Verdonschot, 2013; Taft, 1979). As with lexicalfrequency, the frequency of a single kanji in a jukugo (e.g.
the kanji si 思 “think” in the two-kanji compound sikoo 思
考 “thought”) has also been shown to influence the processing speed of the entire word (Tamaoka, & Hatsuzuka,
1995). This effect has also been documented for Chinesecharacters (Taft, Huang, & Zhu, 1994; Taft, & Zhu, 1995,
1997; Wu, Chou, & Liu, 1994; Zhou, & Marslen-Wilson,
1994).
Additionally, proper nouns such as names of people,
companies, and places are processed differently fromgeneral nouns (Valentine, Moore, & Brédart, 1995). For
instance, experimental studies comparing proper nouns andgeneral nouns found reduced response latencies for proper
nouns versus general nouns (e.g. Müller, 2010; Proverbio,
Mariani, Zani, & Adorni, 2009; Wang, Verdonschot, &Yang, 2016). Wang et al. (2016) explain this difference asfollows: the name “Thomas Edison” is connected to its
semantic referent only via the knowledge of an individual
whereas the general noun “inventor” is connected to a large
number of associations representing semantic information.
Frequencies for the 2136 kanji of the Jōyō kanji list were
calculated using the Mainichi Newspaper corpus. Kanji
frequencies with proper nouns (including names such as:佐藤) ranged from 27 to 2817,613, with a mean of 85,823(SD 173,833). The frequencies of the 2136 kanji with andwithout proper nouns adhere to a power-law distribution. In
this distribution, among the 2136 kanji, a few kanji appear
very frequently while the majority of kanji occur
infrequently.
It should be noted that the accumulative kanji frequencies are calculated based on all words in thepresent newspaper corpus. Some words in the corpus
cannot be identified as either an On-reading or a Kunreading. Thus, the accumulative frequency of a kanji(Kanji frequency with/without proper nouns) is notalways equal to the sum of a kanji’s accumulative
frequency of On-readings with/without proper nouns(Acc. Freq. On with/without proper nouns) and a kanji’s accumulative frequency of On-readings with/without proper nouns (Acc. Freq. Kun with/without
proper nouns). That is, the Kanji frequency with/without proper nouns can be larger than the sum of Acc.
Freq. On with/without proper nouns and Acc. Freq. Kun
with/without proper nouns.

Kun within Jōyō
Japanese kanji often have multiple readings in both Onand Kun-readings. For example, the kanji 歩 “to walk” or“a step” has two Kun-readings; aru(ku) for the verb “towalk” and ayu(mu) for the noun “a step” or “a walk” asspecified in the Jōyō kanji list. Thus, these two Kunreadings are Kun within Jōyō.
# of meanings of Kun
Many kanji are considered to be morphemic units. Eachkanji, therefore, can be combined with another to create
multiple kanji compound words. This word construction
process can increase the number of meanings associatedwith a kanji. For instance, the kanji 歩 has two Kunreadings, but three meanings related to these two sounds.
Thus, the number of meanings of Kun-readings (# ofmeanings of Kun) is 3. The translations of two Kun-readings (translation of Kun) are ‘walk’, ‘hike’ and ‘step’.
Year of inclusion
The first Jōyō kanji list was originally produced by theJapanese government in 1981. At this time, there were1945 kanji in the list. In 2010, this list was modified to have
2136 kanji. Five kanji were removed, and 196 kanji wereadded. Kanji which appeared in the old version of the list
are indicated by ‘1981’. The five kanji (i.e., 勺, 錘, 銑, 脹,匁), which were excluded from the new list, are no longer
included in the present database. The 196 kanji (e.g. 曖,
宛, 釜, 鎌, 窟, 熊) added in 2010 are recorded as ‘2010’.
Since only two versions of the list are available, the valuesof Year of Inclusion take either ‘1981’ or ‘2010’.

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Acc. Freq. On with proper nouns
We used MeCab (Kudo, Yamamoto, & Matsumoto, 2004) to
identify to identify proper nouns (固有名詞) in the 2000–
2010 Mainichi Newspaper corpus. Once proper nouns were
tagged, the accumulative frequency of On-readings withproper nouns (Acc. Freq. On with proper nouns) was calculated for each of the 2136 kanji by selecting words onlywith On-readings including proper nouns.
Acc. Freq. Kun with proper nouns
Similarly, the accumulative frequencies of Kun-readings
with proper nouns (Acc. Freq. Kun with proper nouns)
were calculated for each of the 2136 kanji by selecting
words only with Kun-readings including proper nouns.
On ratio with proper nouns
The On-reading ratio is defined as a kanji’s accumulative
frequency of On-readings divided by the kanji’s total
accumulative frequency of On-readings and Kun-readings.
Since the values in Kanji frequency with proper nouns
include kanji whose pronunciations cannot be identified aseither On- or Kun-readings, the On-reading ratio is calculated by Acc. Freq. On with proper nouns divided by Acc.
Freq. On with proper nouns plus Acc. Freq. Kun withproper nouns. The Kun-reading ratio for each kanji issimply calculated by the inverse (i.e., 1—the On ratio). Onreading ratios and Kun-reading ratios are useful for situations which require controlling kanji with multiple readings
while still experimentally assessing phonological activations when processing Japanese kanji. For instance, usingmasked priming, Verdonschot et al. (2013) showed that all
pronunciations of a single kanji with around a 50 % Onreading ratio are simultaneously activated upon visualpresentation of that kanji (e.g. mizu and sui, both meaningwater, are activated upon seeing 水). Tamaoka and Taft(2010) also controlled kanji On-reading ratios to investigate On- and Kun-reading sub-lexica.
The present kanji database provides four different Onreading ratio categories by separating kanji with andwithout proper nouns, and similarly within and beyond
standard On-readings in the Jōyō kanji list. For On-readings within the Jōyō kanji list: (1) the On-reading ratioswith proper nouns averaged 73.83 % (SD 33.60 %) while(2) the On-reading ratios without proper nouns averaged
74.82 % (SD 32.91 %). For On-readings, including thosebeyond the standard Jōyō kanji, (3) the On-reading ratioswith proper nouns averaged 73.77 % (SD 32.65 %) while(4) On-reading ratios without proper nouns averaged
71.87 % (SD 33.30 %). The second category (i.e., the On-

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reading ratios without proper nouns) is recommended forusage in most Japanese language processing experiments.
Acc. Freq. On/Kun beyond Jōyō with proper nouns
The Jōyō kanji list provides On- and Kun-readings for eachof the 2136 kanji. However, the list excluded some rarereadings. For researchers who wish to have a complete
kanji frequency overview including all the kanji sounds, we
calculated both kanji frequencies within and beyond theJōyō kanji list. It should be noted that rare readings beyond
the Jōyō kanji list are taken from readings described in the
Kanji Sources Revised dictionary (Fifth Version; Todo,2010).
Acc. Freq. Kun beyond Jōyō with proper nouns
The accumulative frequencies of Kun-readings beyond theJōyō kanji list with proper nouns (Acc. Freq. Kun beyondJōyō with proper nouns) were calculated for each of the2136 kanji by selecting words only with Kun-readings
beyond the list, including proper nouns. Those kanji which
do not have any Kun-reading outside of the Jōyō kanji list
have this frequency recorded 0. For instance, the kanji 学
has only one Kun-reading with inflection mana(bu) included in the list, so its Acc. Freq. Kun beyond proper nouns is
0. In case that a Kun-reading is found beyond the list, if
there is no words found in the newspaper corpus, it’s frequency would be 0 as well.
On ratio beyond Jōyō with proper nouns
The On-reading ratio beyond the Jōyō kanji list with proper
nouns (On ratio beyond Jōyō with proper nouns) is defined
as a kanji’s accumulative frequency of On-readings divided
by the kanji’s total accumulative frequency with proper
nouns, including both On-readings and Kun-readings
beyond the list. This ratio is considered as an overall grandOn-reading ratio of the present corpus. It should be notedthat an On-reading ratio beyond the Jōyō kanji list withproper nouns (On ratio beyond Jōyō with proper nouns) isequal to an On-reading ratio within the Jōyō kanji list
without proper nouns (On ratio with proper nouns) wheneither there are no On-/Kun-readings beyond the list or
there are no words sounded by On-/Kun-readings beyond
the list in the present corpus.
Kanji frequency without proper nouns
See Kanji frequency with proper nouns for details. The
same kanji without proper nouns ranged in frequency 6–
1,855,755 with a mean of 73,337 (SD 149,730).

Psychological Research (2017) 81:696–708

703

Acc. Freq. On without proper nouns

Left Kanji Prod. and right Kanji Prod

The accumulative frequencies of On-readings without
proper nouns (Acc. Freq. On without proper nouns) were
calculated for each of the 2136 kanji by selecting words
only with On-readings excluding proper nouns.

A large majority of Japanese words consists of two kanji.
According to Yokosawa and Umeda (1988), two-kanji
compound words are extremely common, making up about
70 % of the entries in Japanese dictionaries. In two-kanji
compound words, each kanji can be placed on either theleft-side or the right-side. Kanji lexical productivity (Kanji
Prod.) refers to how frequently a single kanji appears in
two-kanji compound words in combination with anotherkanji. For instance, 水 ‘water’ with the On-reading, sui, canbe placed on the left-side of the compound, as 水深
sui + sin ‘the depth of the water’, 水泳 sui + ei ‘swimming’, 水洗 sui + sen ‘water closet’, or on the right-side of
the compound, as 渇水 kas-sui ‘shortage of water’, 湖水
ko-sui ‘lake’, and 噴水 hun-sui ‘fountain’. Kanji productivity refers to two units of kanji being combined to create
two-kanji compound words. When the kanji is placed on
the left-side of the compound, the number of words which
are created by the kanji is the left-side kanji productivity(left Kanji Prod.). Likewise, when the kanji is placed on theright-side, the number of words produced is the right-side
kanji productivity (right Kanji Prod.). To calculate theseproductivities, all 27,950 jukugo (two-kanji compoundwords) were taken from 2000 to 2010 Mainichi Newspaper
corpus. The number of left-hand and right-hand kanji
productivities are counted for each of the 2136 kanji, using
this two-kanji compound word database.

Acc. Freq. Kun without proper nouns
Likewise, the accumulative frequencies of Kun-readings
without proper nouns (Acc. Freq. Kun without proper
nouns) were calculated for each of the 2136 kanji byselecting words only with Kun-readings excluding proper
nouns.
On ratio without proper nouns
The On-reading ratio without proper nouns (On ratio
without proper nouns) was calculated using accumulative
frequencies for kanji with On-reading without proper nouns
divided by the sum of the kanji’s On-reading and Kunreading accumulative frequency without proper nouns.
Acc. Freq. On beyond Jōyō without proper nouns
The accumulative frequencies of On-readings without
proper nouns (Acc. Freq. On without proper nouns) were
calculated for each of the 2136 kanji by selecting words
beyond On-readings excluding proper nouns. As it is rather
rare to find On-readings beyond the list, the frequency willoften be zero.
Acc. Freq. Kun beyond Jōyō without proper nouns
The accumulative frequencies of Kun-readings without
proper nouns (Acc. Freq. Kun without proper nouns) were
calculated for each of the 2136 kanji by selecting words
beyond Kun-readings excluding proper nouns. As it israther rare to find Kun-readings beyond the list, this frequency will often be zero.
On ratio beyond Jōyō without proper nouns
The On-reading ratio beyond the Jōyō kanji list without
proper nouns (On ratio beyond Jōyō without proper nouns)
is defined as a kanji accumulative frequency of On-readings divided by the total kanji accumulative frequency
including On-/Kun-readings beyond the list, but excluding
proper nouns. Since proper nouns are excluded, this Onreading ratio is considered unbiased and suitable for the useof experiments.

Acc. Freq. left Prod. and Acc. Freq. right Prod
Kanji left-hand and right-hand productivities (left Kanji
Prod. and right Kanji Prod.) are simply a count of two-kanji
compound words produced by a single kanji with no consideration of word frequency. Accumulative word
frequency of all words together is considered to be moreaccurate in indicating the magnitude of kanji lexical productivity, compared to a simple count of each produced
word (Tamaoka, & Makioka, 2004). Accumulative kanji
lexical productivities on the left-side (Acc. Freq. left Prod.)and on the right-side (Acc. Freq. right Prod.) are calculated
by adding all the frequencies of occurrence for words in all
27,950 jukugo.
Symmetry
As explained in the kanji productivity section, each kanji
creates various two-kanji compound words by combining
with another kanji on the left-side or right-side. Symmetry
indicates a balance tendency of kanji productivity between
the left-side and the right-sides. An asymptotic test for

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Psychological Research (2017) 81:696–708

symmetry is performed for each of the 2136 Jōyō Kanji.
Consider the number of left-side compounds to be nL, andthose of the right-hand side to be nR, and nL + nR = n.
Under the hypothesis of equality of both sides, the expectedvalue is n/2. The asymptotic Chi square criterion is:v2 ¼ðnL  nRÞ2nL þ nR

which is distributed as a Chi square with one degree of
freedom. In order to be significant at the 0.05 level, this Chi
square value must be greater than 3.84 (for details see,Tamaoka, & Altman, 2004).
When a kanji occurs in fewer than five compounds, it
occurs too infrequently to be symmetrical. The symmetryof these kanji was then recoded as ‘·’. When a kanji wasjudged to be symmetric (no significance), it was represented by ‘S.’ When the left-side productivity (left Kanji
Prod.) was greater than that of the right-hand side with a
Chi square value larger than 3.84, a kanji was judged asprogressively asymmetric, indicated by ‘P.’ When theright-side productivity (right Kanji Prod.) was greater thanthe left-side, a kanji was judged as regressively asymmetric, represented by ‘R.’ A large number out of the 2136
kanji in the Jōyō kanji list (939 kanji or 44.00 %) portrayedparticular symmetry patterns. Concerning the two asymmetry types, we found 372 kanji (or 17.40 %) of the
progressive ‘P’ type, and 421 kanji (or 19.70 %) of theregressive ‘R’ type.
Left entropy and right entropy
Entropy in the present database refers to how randomly
each kanji produces a two-kanji compound (for moredetails see, Tamaoka, & Makioka, 2004, p.553.). Entropy is
calculated using the formula.
XH ¼
pj log2 pj
In this formula, the p in the formula stands for the
probability that a specific word will appear among all thecompound words combined with multiple kanji on the leftside (left Entropy) or the right-side (right Entropy) of the
kanji. If a kanji produces a great variety of two-kanji
compound words, its entropy is larger. On the other hand, if
the kanji is combined with a small number of kanji toproduce two-kanji compound words, its entropy is smaller.
The entropies of the 2136 kanji in the Jōyō kanji list
indicated a mean of 1.34 (SD 1.15) for the left-side, and amean of 1.41 (SD 1.13) for the right-side. Entropies
depicted an overall similar pattern for both sides when
producing two-kanji compound words among the 2136
kanji.

123

Left/right sound [1–7] and left/right frequency [1–7]
As described earlier, many kanji have multiple pronunciations, which differ depending upon whether the kanji ispositioned on the left or right side of a compound. The
present database provides frequency order concerning kanji
pronunciations for both sides (left/right sound [1–7]) andtheir accumulative (or token) frequencies for both sides(left/right frequency [1–7]). Occurrences of a given kanji,
in which Kun-readings with inflections are counted once,
are aggregated in Table 3 (for details see the section of Onand Kun-readings) for calculating the number of Kunreadings available for a given kanji. As depicted in Table 3,
five kanji placed on the left side of a compound involved
up to six different kanji pronunciations while two kanji
placed on the right side had up to seven different
pronunciations.
Comparing the kanji frequency of the present
database with previous databases
The overlapping kanji between the old and new Jōyō
kanji list are exactly 1940. The two previously-createdkanji databases were compared using these shared kanji
with the present kanji database. Yokoyama, Sasahara,
Nozaki and Long (1998) created a database consisting of4583 kanji and their printed frequencies using the 1993
Tokyo edition of the Asahi Newspaper corpus, consistingof a printed and a CD-ROM version. The printed version(M 8611 times, SD 18,065 times) is smaller in corpus
size than CD-ROM version (M 12,514 times, SD 26,122
times). Tamaoka et al., (2002) produced the first webaccessible kanji database in 2002 containing the earlier
version of the Jōyō kanji list which culminated in the
fourth edition two years later (Tamaoka, & Makioka,
2004).
Pearson’s correlations coefficients among these three
kanji databases and the present database were calculatedusing natural logarithms converted from kanji frequencies.
The kanji database of the printed 1993 Asashi newspaper
version (Yokoyama et al., 1998) was .966 (p \ .001) withthe present database of the 2000–2010 Mainichi Newspaperwith proper nouns, and .922 (p \ .001) without proper
nouns. Likewise, the kanji database of the Asashi newspaper 1993 CD-ROM version also showed a very highcorrelation at .965 (p \ .001) with the present databasewith proper nouns, and .918 (p \ .001) without proper
nouns. The kanji database encompassing the 1985–1998
Asashi newspaper based on Amano, & Kondo (1999, 2000)(see Tamaoka, & Makioka, 2004) showed a slightly lower,
but still very high correlation with the present database at

Psychological Research (2017) 81:696–708

705

Table 1 Distribution of the 2136 kanji in the Jōyō kanji list within school grades and JLPT-test levels
School grade

JLPT-test level

Total

4th

3rd

2nd

1st

1st

49

19

12

0

80

2nd

31

72

51

6

160

3rd

0

58

133

9

200

4th

0

12

158

30

200

5th

0

2

137

46

185

6th

0

2

98

81

181

Total

80

165

589

172

1006

Table 2 Numbers of On- and Kun-readings in the Jōyō kanji list (N = 2136)
Number of Kun-readings

Number of On-readings
0

1

Sum
2

3

5

0

0

743

76

2

0

821

1

69

886

126

11

1

1,093

2

6

142

43

3

0

194

3

0

17

4

1

0

22

4

0

1

2

0

0

3

5

0

0

1

0

0

1

6
Sum

0
75

0
1789

2
254

0
17

0
1

2
2136

This table was created using the numbers of pronunciations specified in the 2136 Jōyō kanji list, but the number of Kun-readings in thetable excludes overlapped sounds in Kun-readings with inflections (the same sound is counted once)

Table 3 Frequency order of kanji pronunciations and their accumulative (token) frequencies for the 2136 kanji on the Jōyō kanji list
Frequency order of kanji pronunciations

Left-sideN

Right-side
Accumulative frequency
M

SD

N

Accumulative frequency
Mean

SD

1st

1988

23,84453,992

1912

24,82553,353

2nd

816

3353

12,659742

3332

12,695

3rd
4th

213
55

1763
291

8779
615

233
72

1123
524

3397
1310

5th

15

85

122

17

375

872

6th

5

38

63

11

62

84

7th

–

–

–

2

83

98

.847 (p \ .001) with proper nouns, and .895 (p \ .001)
without proper nouns. The correlation between the presentkanji database between with and without proper nouns
indicated a high correlation at .948 (p \ .001). In all, thepresent kanji database displayed high correlations with theprevious two kanji databases.

The novel two-kanji compound word (jukugo)
database
Experimental studies involving the Japanese language
most often use two-kanji compound words. In our
database, two-kanji compound words are defined as

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words combing a left-side kanji, or first-kanji, with aright-side kanji, or second-kanji. These compounds are
frequently used to depict lexical items. In contemporary
Japanese, kanji compound words not only represent
lexical items, adapted to Japanese orthography from
Chinese (kango), but also various new lexical items
formed by the Japanese themselves (e.g. 経
済 keizai ‘economy’) in the process of translating various European and American books especially around the
Meiji Restoration in 1868. These new compound words
are frequently constructed by two kanji with On-readings. Additionally, words which originated in Japan(wago) mostly contain two kanji which are pronounced
in their Kun-readings. With these distinct features, themajority of lexical items in the Japanese lexicon are
two-kanji compounds. In order to enhance the usefulnessof the kanji database further we created a lexical database containing Japanese jukugo (two-kanji compounds)
with their lexical properties (all without proper nouns).
All 27,950 compounds were selected from the Mainichi
Newspaper corpus. Compounds are separately accessible,
but all compounds for a given kanji can be searched andstored via a direct query from the website (see themanual section of the website for details).
It should be noted that, according to MeCab (Kudo
Yamamoto, & Matsumoto, 2004), some two-kanji compound words are treated as two separate lexical categories.
These compounds are written using the same two kanji,
therefore we combined the two different frequencies into one
frequency. For example, koohee 公平, ‘fair’, is counted 3659
times as an adjective, and 116 times as a noun. Although thisword is more often used as an adjective, we still counted both
frequencies together, totaling 3775. The final database ofcompounds encompassed a total type frequency of 27,950
words, and the total token frequency was 50,813,587.
The jukugo database provides information ordered innine columns. For instance, inputting a single kanji 玉‘ball’ into the “look up jukugo” field on the website will
display 46 compounds. In 20 of these compounds, 玉appears on the left side (e.g. gyokusai 玉砕), and in 26
compounds, 玉 appears on the right side (e.g. medama 目玉). Nine columns displaying information for each compound are subsequently provided by the present database:(1) compound word ID, (2) the two-kanji compound itself(3) compound word frequency, (4) additional grammaticalusage for the compound, (5) pronunciation in Roma-ji(Japanese Romanization), and (6) an English translation,(7) a target kanji position (left or right side position in acompound), (8) the target kanji, and (9) the ID of thetarget kanji.

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Conclusion
There are ample psychological and linguistic studies published on a variety of topics which have involved theJapanese language in some way (see “Introduction”). Manyof these studies included the usage of kanji (a logographic
script derived from Chinese) with a focus on those kanji
which are assumed to be known by all Japanese people.
These kanji are officially represented in the Jōyō kanji-list
which was originally drafted in 1981 by the Japanese
government (but has undergone a significant change in2010).
Currently available databases have not yet included thischange into their database. Additionally, many are basedon slightly dated corpora and the majority of the databases
cost a significant amount of money to use. These issues
were the basis for the construction of two new and freely
available databases involving Japanese kanji and theircompound words. The present paper reports the availabilityof: (1) a database containing all 2136 kanji from the mostrecent Jōyō Kanji list and (2) a database containing their27,950 two-kanji compound words (jukugo). Both databases are based on the extensive (i.e., a token frequency of
about 300 million) and recent Mainichi Newspaper corpus(ranging from 2000 to 2010). To provide interactive accessto these databases we have constructed an easy-to-use
online web interface (www.kanjidatabase.com) that allows
unrestricted access to all the information stored in both
databases.
The primary use of the present databases and its interactive website is to aid psychologists, linguists and other
scholars interested in performing research involving theJapanese language, although it is not difficult to imagine
other, more educational (and perhaps even recreational)
uses. The four most important reasons to consider thecurrent databases are: (1) they are based on the most recentJōyō kanji list, (2) they are based on a very large and up-todate corpus, (3) they are freely available (opposed to manyother databases), (4) access to the databases is madeexceptionally easy through an online graphical user interface (www.kanjidatabase.com).
In conclusion, the databases laid out in this paper can bereadily used for the construction of stimuli for psycholinguistic and linguistic experiments or to look up specificproperties of a kanji for scientific purposes. We believe
they constitute a valuable addition for those working with
the Japanese language.
Acknowledgments The present work was supported by the Grantin-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research, JSPS Grant number

Psychological Research (2017) 81:696–708
25580112 (principal researcher: Katsuo Tamaoka), by the Grant-inAid for Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), JSPS Grant Number
15K02656 (principal researcher: Kazuko Komori), and a Grand-InAid for JSPS postdoctoral fellows (12F02315) and a JSPS Research
Activity Start-Up Grant (15H06687) to Rinus G. Verdonschot.

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