KOKUJI (国字): THE JAPANESE “NATIONAL CHARACTERS”. A CASE STUDY: THE JAPANESE ACQUATIC FAUNA

The great influence that the Chinese writing system has had on the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese writing systems is widely demonstrated. Nevertheless, besides the use of the characters directly imported from China, these cultures have had the necessity to create “national characters” to satisfy the needs of their own languages. This paper, that analyzes this phenomenon in the Japanese environment, begins with an analysis of the reasons that have pushed the Japanese “to create” own characters and the reasons why at a certain moment such “creation” has been suspended. In the second part of the paper samples of kokuji will be presented that can be circumscribed to those with radicals 魚・鳥・木・草 and that result to be surely the most numerous and related to species of flora and fauna japonica.