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Remembering the Kanji

vol. I

A complete course on how not to forget

the meaning and writing

of Japanese characters

James W. Heisig

fourth edition

japan publications trading co., ltd.

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Note to the 4th Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

part one: Stories (Lessons 1–12) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

part two: Plots (Lessons 13–19) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

part three: Elements (Lessons 20–56) . . . . . . . . . . 197

Indexes

i. Kanji . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473

ii. Primitive Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491

iii. Kanji Arranged in Order of Strokes . . . . . . . . . . 495

iv. Key Words and Primitive Meanings . . . . . . . . . . 505

Introduction

The aim of this book is to provide the student of Japanese with a simple

method for correlating the writing and the meaning of Japanese characters in

such a way as to make them both easy to remember. It is intended not only for

the beginner, but also for the more advanced student looking for some relief

to the constant frustration of forgetting how to write the kanji and some way

to systematize what he or she already knows. By showing how to break down

the complexities of the Japanese writing system into its basic elements and sug-

gesting ways to reconstruct meanings from those elements, the method offers

a new perspective from which to learn the kanji.

There are, of course, many things that the pages of this book will not do for

you. You will read nothing about how kanji combine to form compounds. Nor

is anything said about the various ways to pronounce the characters. Further-

more, all questions of grammatical usage have been omitted. These are all mat-

ters that need specialized treatment in their own right. Meantime, remember-

ing the meaning and the writing of the kanji—perhaps the single most dif³cult

barrier to learning Japanese—can be greatly simpli³ed if the two are isolated

and studied apart from everything else.

What makes forgetting the kanji so natural is their lack of connection with

normal patterns of visual memory. We are used to hills and roads, to the faces

of people and the skylines of cities, to µowers, animals, and the phenomena of

nature. And while only a fraction of what we see is readily recalled, we are

con³dent that, given proper attention, anything we choose to remember, we

can. That con³dence is lacking in the world of the kanji. The closest approxi-

mation to the kind of memory patterns required by the kanji is to be seen in

the various alphabets and number-systems we know. The difference is that

while these symbols are very few and often sound-related, the kanji number in

the thousands and have no consistent phonetic value. Nonetheless, traditional

methods for learning the characters have been the same as those for learning

alphabets: drill the shapes one by one, again and again, year after year. What-

ever ascetical value there is in such an exercise, the more ef³cient way would

be to relate the characters to something other than their sounds in the ³rst

place, and so to break ties with the visual memory we rely on for learning our

alphabets.

introduction

The origins of the Japanese writing system can be traced back to ancient

China and the eighteenth century before the Christian era. In the form in

which we ³nd Chinese writing codi³ed some 1,000 years later, it was made up

largely of pictographic, detailed glyphs. These were further transformed and

stylized down through the centuries, so that by the time the Japanese were

introduced to the kanji by Buddhist monks from Korea and started experi-

menting with ways to adapt the Chinese writing system to their own language

(about the fourth to seventh centuries of our era), they were already dealing

with far more ideographic and abstract forms. The Japanese made their own

contributions and changes in time, as was to be expected. And like every mod-

ern Oriental culture that uses the kanji, they continue to do so, though now

more in matters of usage than form.

So fascinating is this story that many have encouraged the study of etymol-

ogy as a way to remember the kanji. Unfortunately, the student quickly learns

the many disadvantages of such an approach. As charming as it is to see the

ancient drawing of a woman etched behind its respective kanji, or to discover

the rudimentary form of a hand or a tree or a house, when the character itself

is removed, the clear visual memory of the familiar object is precious little help

for recalling how to write it. Proper etymological studies are most helpful after

one has learned the general-use kanji. Before that, they only add to one’s mem-

ory problems. We need a still more radical departure from visual memory.

Let me paint the impasse in another, more graphic, way. Picture yourself

holding a kaleidoscope up to the light as still as possible, trying to ³x in mem-

ory the particular pattern that the play of light and mirrors and colored stones

has created. Chances are you have such an untrained memory for such things

that it will take some time; but let us suppose that you succeed after ten or

³fteen minutes. You close your eyes, trace the pattern in your head, and then

check your image against the original pattern until you are sure you have it

remembered. Then someone passes by and jars your elbow. The pattern is lost,

and in its place a new jumble appears. Immediately your memory begins to

scramble. You set the kaleidoscope aside, sit down, and try to draw what you

had just memorized, but to no avail. There is simply nothing left in memory

to grab hold of. The kanji are like that. One can sit at one’s desk and drill a half

dozen characters for an hour or two, only to discover on the morrow that

when something similar is seen, the former memory is erased or hopelessly

confused by the new information.

Now the odd thing is not that this occurs, but rather that, instead of openly

admitting one’s distrust of purely visual memory, one accuses oneself of a poor

memory or lack of discipline and keeps on following the same routine. Thus,

by placing the blame on a poor visual memory, one overlooks the possibility of

introduction

another form of memory that could handle the task with relative ease: imagi-

native memory.

By imaginative memory I mean the faculty to recall images created purely

in the mind, with no actual or remembered visual stimuli behind them. When

we recall our dreams we are using imaginative memory. The fact that we some-

times conµate what happened in waking life with what merely occurred in a

dream is an indication of how powerful those imaginative stimuli can be.

While dreams may be broken up into familiar component parts, the compos-

ite whole is fantastical and yet capable of exerting the same force on perceptual

memory as an external stimulus. It is possible to use imagination in this way

also in a waking state and harness its powers for assisting a visual memory

admittedly ill-adapted for remembering the kanji.

In other words, if we could discover a limited number of basic elements in

the characters and make a sort of alphabet out of them, assigning to each its own

image, fusing them together to form other images, and so building up complex

tableaux in imagination, the impasse created by purely visual memory might

be overcome. Such an imaginative alphabet would be every bit as rigorous as a

phonetic one in restricting each basic element to one basic value; but its gram-

mar would lack many of the controls of ordinary language and logic. It would

be like a kind of dream-world where anything at all might happen, and happen

differently in each mind. Visual memory would be used minimally, to build up

the alphabet. After that, one would be set loose to roam freely inside the magic

lantern of imaginative patterns according to one’s own preferences.

In fact, most students of the Japanese writing system do something similar

from time to time, devising their own mnemonic aids but never developing an

organized approach to their use. At the same time, most of them would be

embarrassed at the academic silliness of their own secret devices, feeling some-

how that there is no way to re³ne the ridiculous ways their mind works. Yet if

it does work, then some such irreverence for scholarship and tradition seems

very much in place. Indeed, shifting attention from why one forgets certain

kanji to why one remembers others should offer motivation enough to under-

take a more thorough attempt to systematize imaginative memory.

The basic alphabet of the imaginative world hidden in the kanji we may

call, following traditional terminology, primitive elements ( or simply primi-

tives ) . These are not to be confused with the so-called “radicals” which form

the basis of etymological studies of sound and meaning, and now are used for

the lexical ordering of the characters. In fact, most of the radicals are them-

selves primitives, but the number of primitives is not restricted to the tradi-

tional list of radicals.

The primitives, then, are the fundamental strokes and combinations of

strokes from which all the characters are built up. Calligraphically speaking,

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