 the  are a set of 861 chinese characters known as the "name kanji" in english. they are a supplementary set of characters that can be legally used in registered personal names in japan, despite not being in that country's set of "commonly used characters" (jÅyÅ kanji). as a rule, registered personal names may contain only jÅyÅ kanji, jinmeiyÅ kanji, katakana and hiragana. jinmeiyÅ kanji is sometimes used to mean only the 861 characters, or to mean the 2997 characters in both the jinmeiyÅ and jÅyÅ sets. all characters outside the jinmeiyÅ list in the large sense (2997 characters) are known as hyÅgaiji. a ministerial decree of 1946 limited the number of officially sanctioned kanji for public use to the 1850 tÅyÅ kanji. only kanji on this list were acceptable as registered names, despite the fact that the list excluded many kanji frequently used in names up to that point. however, on may 25, 1951, the cabinet extended the set of characters usable in names by specifying the first 90 jinmeiyÅ kanji. over the years, the minister of justice has increased the number of name kanji, and has a plan for further addition in response to requests from parents. as of april 30, 2009, there were 985 jinmeiyÅ kanji, but this number was reduced to 861 in late 2010 when 129 jinmeiyÅ characters were transferred to the jÅyÅ kanji list, and 5 characters were transferred from the jÅyÅ kanji list to jinmeiyÅ characters. in japan, name kanji are taught at the junior-high level, and mastery of the name kanji is required to achieve level 2 of the kanji kentei, a chinese-character proficiency test. before september 27, 2004, there were 2232 government-designated jinmeiyÅ kanji used in personal and geographical names, with plans to increase this list by 578 kanji, the largest increase since world war ii. the plan was not without controversy, however. for example, the characters for "cancer", "hemorrhoids", "corpse" and "excrement", as well as parts of compound words (words created from two or more chinese characters) meaning "curse", "prostitute", and "rape", were among the proposed additions to the list. this was because no measures were taken to determine the appropriateness of the kanji proposed, with the committee deciding that parents could make such decisions themselves. however, the council dropped these proposed inclusions after public protest. some of these kanji have led to speculation that the "odd" kanji being added to the names list are being done so in an attempt to make a de facto expansion of the jÅyÅ kanji list, rather than with the serious idea that anyone will use them in names. the idea of reducing the number of kanji in us
Japanese_writing_system Kanji Names_by_language