Japanese has the most complicated writing system of any language. For a long time handwriting was the easiest means of written communication, and faxes can transmit handwriting. There are good Japanese IMEs now, but if faxes already work why change them?
This is not true at all. Japanese Kanji comprise only a few thousand characters (~2000 being considered sufficient for functional literacy). Chinese has well over 50000 characters.
All Traditional Chinese characters are valid in Japanese even if they're only used for names. Japanese also has kanji invented in Japan which are not valid in Chinese. There are currently 2136 jōyō (general use) kanji, which are the bare minimum you need to known to be considered literate, but if that's all you know you're going to spend a lot of time with a dictionary. In practice you need at least 3000 characters, which is about the same as you need in Chinese.
Based on this answer and your other answers, I have to think that you know neither Chinese nor Japanese at particularly high level of proficiency. Furthermore, your answers look like they are Wikipedia stock.
1. “all traditional Chinese characters...” — The vast majority of these are only used in classical literature or historical documents. Furthermore, multiple times throughout Japanese history, certain Chinese characters (usually similar) have been merged into one character. This is one reason Japanese characters often have multiple ways to pronounce them, while Chinese characters typically only have one.
2. Joyo kanji 1 — This is hardly the “bare minimum” for basic literacy for daily life (which is maybe half that). Japanese kids learn about 1000 kanji (kyouiku) in elementary school and about 1000 more (the remaining joyo) in junior high school. JHS is the end of compulsory education in Japan. Daily life kanji are more in the kyouiku kanji. The JHS has some practical kanji, but it gets bookish and sometimes a bit obscure very quickly.
3. Joyo kanji 2 - Note that government documents can only use joyo kanji. Maybe they can use furigana if necessary for non-joyo. As a default, most of the press only uses joyo, and they definitely use furigana liberally.
4. Joyo kanji 3 - Given that I have used joyo kanji at one time or another that most of my Japanese friends and acquaintances did not know, I think that calling this a “bare minimum” needed to be considered literate is a bit harsh. That said, I don’t recall ever having stumped academics, K-12 teachers, doctors, or lawyers on any joyo kanji. So if you want to call it a bare minimum to be considered highly educated, then I would agree.
5. Joyo kanji 4 - No Japanese person I know who pretty much caps out at joyo kanji uses a dictionary very often — perhaps as much as an American would looking up relatively uncommon Latin or Greek words/terms.
6. From my experience, you need about 5k characters to read a newspaper in Chinese (that was around what I learned), while the 2k joyo were complete fine for Japanese. While I did/do look up
words in both languages, they are either domain-specific words (where I often don’t know much about the domain in English, Chinese, or Japanese), or it is a scholarly flavor word. Note that I still look up words in English as well (thank you every George Will article ever).
I don’t have any links or sources readily available (I’m on my phone), but I am fairly certain that research on word and kanji frequency lists in these languages will support my numbers much more than they support yours.
Clarification — One needs to know about 5k Chinese characters to have similar text coverage in Chinese newspapers as joyo kanji would give one in Japanese newspapers.
The actual percentages can vary small bit based on how one treats characters for names, but these numbers are directionally correct.
JIS X 0213 has 11,233 characters across multiple alphabets that gets mixed together in the same sentence, plus the issue of horizontal and vertical typesetting, ruby text, and having to use Unicode Ideographic Variation Sequences to handle things like writing people's names correctly.
Characters have a defined way of writing the strokes, so you look them up by number of strokes and radical. ("Radical" being, usually, the bit on the left or the top)
You can see a web-based example at [2]. Click on the "Radicals" button in the upper right. You'll see a list of radicals (sorted by stroke order), and clicking/unclicking on them will cause the list of kanji below to change.
Kanji are composed from a much smaller set of radicals, so you look it up by the radicals that compose it. Some dictionaries also divide characters up by stroke count. For the past 15+ years, electronic dictionaries with handwriting recognition have been popular, and now you can just use your phone keyboard.
In practice, sometimes you can also kind of guess at the pronunciation (since characters with the same main radical often have a similar pronunciation) and see what autocomplete lists; maybe that's less true outside of the joyo kanji, though.
Of course they do. In fact, there are two main types of Chinese dictionaries: phonetic dictionaries organized by pronunciation and character dictionaries organized by radical.
Thanks for the reply, my question was intented to be rhetorical but my writing style wasn't the best. I was just trying to get JohnBooty to do a quick google search for Kanji/Hanzi dictionaries, after all how else could the east have developed such a sophisicated literary tradition without dictionaries.
But Japanese has fewer phonemes than Chinese, and no real tones, which results in a large number of homophones, which makes phonetic writing harder to read. It's not appropriate for business communications.
Faxes don't work. What are you supposed to do with them? Stick them a filing cabinet and then go look them up there when needed? Faxes were better than snail mail but they suck compared to anything modern. Even the Japanese know this.
Recently I have began to wish we still used them, and I say that as a consumer and a UI designer, as I think about all the designs I have made and discarded that could have easily been solved with pen and paper. It may not scale for an Amazon-sized business, but it totally works for small restaurant.
I mean, the design never needed to be designed in the first place. We should have created some manual process until it it becomes so cumbersome to process the requests that it needs to be someone’s full time job.
At least until a few years back only fax was considered 'in writing', so if like a lawyer wanted to submit an appeal to a court it either had to be a letter or a fax, no email. Now the government invented a new authenticated email system which supposedly is like 'in writing'
In which areas is Japan behind? What are some of your observations?