The regional distribution of Japanese kanji

Abstract

In Japan, kanji is generally thought to be used uniformly across the country. However, in reality, there are regional characteristics regarding the frequency of usage concerning specific kanji, the font, how they are read, their usage, and how the word is written. This paper focuses particularly on proper nouns, such as names of localities and families, to verify the types of spatial distributions that exist and examine the literature concerning their geographical and political phenomena and historical events that have occurred.