New Jôyô Kanji

Anyone who's attempted to learn Japanese will probably have come across the Jôyô Kanji (常用漢字), a prescribed list of 1945 kanji which children in Japanese schools are required to learn, and which make up the bulk of characters encountered in daily life and newspapers etc. However, the list is fairly arbitrary and omits several important characters such as 阪 (saka as in Osaka, and 奈 (na as in Nara), two geographical entities which aren't exactly unknown.

Proposals are afoot to expand the Joyo kanji list to 2000 characters by 2010 (the first revision since 1981) and the committee in charge of this (文化審議会) is considering which ones to add. The other day they published a proposal to add 11 kanji used in popular place names; this is the full list:

• 岡 (おか) as in 岡山 - Okayama; lit. "hill" (note: the usual kanji for hill is 丘)
• 阪 (ハン、さか) as in 大阪 - Ôsaka; lit. slope (note: the usual kanji for slope is 坂)
• 鹿 (カ、しか) as in 鹿児島 - Kagoshima; lit "deer"
• 熊 (くま) as in 熊本 - Kumamoto; lit. "bear"
• 茨 (いばら) as in 茨城 - Ibaraki; lit. "briar"
• 栃 (とち) as in 栃木 - Tochigi; lit. "horse chestnut tree"
• 埼 (サイ) as in 埼玉 - Saitama; also 埼京線 - Saikyôsen, an important railway line in Tokyo; lit. "cape" (note: the usual kanji for cape is 崎)
• 梨 (なし) as in 山梨 - Yamanashi; lit. nashi or Japanese pear
• 阜 (ふ) as in 岐阜 - Gifu; lit. hill, mound
• 奈 (な) as in 奈良 - Nara; often used to represent the sound "na"
• 媛 (ひめ) as in 愛媛 - Ehime (not to be confused with the usual kanji for "princess", "姫" - as in 姫路, Himeji)

Source for this information is this article (link may become invalid a few days after this post). Presumably the 文化審議会 will be posting its report in good time on its own website, but the latest information dates from January last year, so don't hold your breath.