Mojikyō

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Mojikyō
Konjaku Mojikyō
今昔こんじゃく文字もじ鏡きょう
Developer(s)Tadahisa Ishikawa
(石川いしかわ忠久ただひさ)
Tokio Furuya
(古家ふるや時雄ときお)
Mojikyō Institute
(文字もじ鏡きょう研究けんきゅう会かい)
Initial release1.0 / July 1997; 26 years ago (1997-07)
Final release
4.0 / December 15, 2018; 5 years ago (2018-12-15)
Operating systemMicrosoft Windows
Size51MB
Available inJapanese
TypeCharacter set bundled with fonts and a character map
LicenseProprietary
Websitemojikyo.org

Mojikyō (Japanese: 文字もじ鏡きょう), also known by its full name Konjaku Mojikyō (今昔こんじゃく文字もじ鏡きょう, lit. '(the) past and present character mirror'), is a character encoding scheme. The Mojikyō Institute (文字もじ鏡きょう研究けんきゅう会かい, Mojikyō Kenkyūkai), which published the character set, also published computer software and TrueType fonts to accompany it. The Mojikyō Institute, chaired by Tadahisa Ishikawa (石川いしかわ忠久ただひさ),[1] originally had its character set and related software and data redistributed on CD-ROMs sold in Kinokuniya stores.[2]

Conceptualized in 1996,[3] the first version of the CD-ROM was released in July 1997.[4] For a time, the Mojikyō Institute also offered a web subscription, termed "Mojikyō WEB" (文字もじ鏡きょうWEB), which had more up-to-date characters.[5]

As of September 2006, Mojikyō encoded 174,975 characters.[6] Among those, 150,366 characters (≈86%) then belonged to the extended Chinese–Japanese–Korean–Vietnamese (CJKV)[note 2] family.[5] Many of Mojikyō's characters are considered obsolete or obscure, and are not encoded by any other character set, including the most widely used international text encoding standard, Unicode.

Originally a paid proprietary software product, as of 2015, the Mojikyō Institute began to upload its latest releases to Internet Archive as freeware,[7] as a memorial to honor one of its developers, Tokio Furuya (古家ふるや時雄ときお), who died that year.[3] On December 15, 2018, version 4.0 was released. The next day, Ishikawa announced that without Furuya this would be the final release of Mojikyō.[3]

Premise[edit]

The Mojikyō encoding was created to provide a complete index of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese characters. It also encodes a large number of characters in ancient scripts, such as the oracle bone script, the seal script, and Sanskrit (Siddhaṃ). For many characters, it is the only character encoding to encode them, and its data is often used as a starting point for Unicode proposals.[8][9] However, Mojikyō has much looser standards than Unicode for encoding, which leads Mojikyō to have many encoded glyphs of dubious, or even unintentionally fictional, origin.[10][11] As such, while many non-Unicode Mojikyō characters are suitable for addition to Unicode, not all can become Unicode characters, due to the differing standards of evidence required by each.

Composition[edit]

The Mojikyō fonts (文字もじ鏡きょうフォント) are TrueType fonts that come in a ZIP file and are each around 2–5 megabytes; the different fonts contain different numbers of characters.[note 3] Also included is a Windows executable that implements a graphical character map, the "Mojikyō Character Map" (文字もじ鏡きょうMAP), MOCHRMAP.EXE.[note 4][note 5] MOCHRMAP.EXE allows users to browse through the Mojikyō fonts, and copy and paste characters in lieu of typing them on the keyboard. As opposed to the regular Windows character map, or for that matter KCharSelect, which both support TrueType fonts, MOCHRMAP.EXE displays the numbered Mojikyō encoding slot of the requested character.[12][note 6] In order for MOCHRMAP.EXE to work, all Mojikyō fonts must be installed.[note 7]

Encoding[edit]

When referring to a character encoded in Mojikyō, the format MJXXXXXX is often used, similar to the U+XXXX format used for Unicode. For example, hentaigana U+1B008 𛀈 HENTAIGANA LETTER I-3 has Mojikyō encoding MJ090007 and Unicode encoding U+1B008.[13] A difference, however, is that Mojikyō encodings displayed this way are decimal, while Unicode's U+ encoding is hexadecimal.

From the earliest days of Unicode, Mojikyō has both influenced—and been influenced by—the standard. Glyphs originating from Mojikyō first appear in a proposal to the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG),[note 8] which is responsible for maintaining all CJK blocks in Unicode,[14][15] on 18 April 2002.[16] In May 2007, Mojikyō played a minor role in an eventually successful series of proposals to encode the Tangut script in Unicode;[17][note 9] Mojikyō already had within its encoding 6,000 Tangut characters by October 2002.[6]

The Unicode Standard's Unihan Database refers to Mojikyō as the "Japanese KOKUJI Collection" (日本にっぽん国字こくじ集しゅう),[18] abbreviated "JK".[19][20] For example, U+2B679 𫙹 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-2B679,[note 10] an ideograph read in Japanese as burizādo (ブリザード, lit. 'blizzard'), has a J-Source[note 11] equal to JK-66038. All Unicode characters with a JK-prefixed J-Source originate from Mojikyō.[21][note 12] According to Ken Lunde, a subject matter expert in character encodings and East Asian languages, as of Unicode 13.0, 782 ideographs in Unicode originate from Mojikyō, split somewhat evenly between two blocks: CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C, with 367, and CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E, with 415.[20][22] Not all Unicode characters with Mojikyō origins (JK-prefixed J-Sources) have the same representative glyph in the code chart as in the Mojikyō font;[note 13] some characters had their shapes changed before final encoding, as investigation showed the shapes assigned by the Mojikyō Institute were wrong.[11][note 14]

Blocks[edit]

As of September 2006 it encoded 174,975 characters.[6] Among those, 150,366 characters then belonged to the extended CJKV[note 2] family.[5] Many of the encoded characters are considered obsolete or otherwise obscure, and are not encoded by any other character set, including the international standard, Unicode. Each Mojikyō character has a unique number, and the characters are organized into blocks.

Mojikyō puts CJKV characters in different blocks according to their traditional Kangxi radical. Common radicals containing an especially high number of characters, such as Radicals 9 (人ひと) and 162 (⻌), are split further by stroke order.[note 15]

No unification[edit]

Unlike Unicode, Mojikyō purposely avoids Han unification; no attempt at compactness of the encoding is made, nor is there an attempt to keep all common characters below U+FFFF as there is in Unicode.

Unicode, on the other hand, sorts its CJK into blocks based on how common they are: the most common are generally put into the Basic Multilingual Plane,[note 14] while those that are rare or obscure are put into the Supplementary Planes.

For example, Radical 9 has two characters where Unicode has one: MJ054435 (令れい), and MJ059031 (令れい), both represented in Unicode as U+4EE4 令れい CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-4EE4.

License[edit]

Mojikyō is proprietary software under a restrictive license. Originally, the Mojikyō Institute tried to prevent its character data from being used, and threatened those who published conversion tables to and from its character set. In July 2010, the Mojikyō Institute abandoned its legal efforts to stop at least one Japanese user from publishing conversion tables or converting characters encoded in Mojikyō to Unicode or other character sets.[23] Mere data, sometimes including the shapes of letters, are considered in many jurisdictions to be common property as they do not meet the threshold of originality.[note 16]

Due to this legacy, however, GlyphWiki [ja] disallowed Mojikyō data as of 2020.[24]

Collected writing systems[edit]

Living[edit]

Dead or obsolete[edit]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "今昔こんじゃく文字もじ鏡きょうについて" [About Mojikyō]. Mojikyō Institute (in Japanese). Archived from the original on 3 February 2001. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  2. ^ ようこそ、今昔こんじゃく文字もじ鏡きょうの世界せかいへ！ [Welcome to the world of Mojikyō!] (in Japanese). Kinokuniya KK. Archived from the original on 4 March 2005. Retrieved 5 July 2020.
  3. ^ a b c Ishikawa, Tadahisa (August 2015). "古家ふるや時雄ときお君くんを悼いたむ" [Tokio Furuya, we grieve your death]. Mojikyō Institute (in Japanese). Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  4. ^ Konjaku Mojikyō 今昔こんじゃく文字もじ鏡きょう (in Japanese), July 1997, ISBN 9784314900034
  5. ^ a b c 今昔こんじゃく文字もじ鏡きょうとは [About Mojikyo] (in Japanese). Kinokuniya KK. Archived from the original on 27 April 2010. Retrieved 5 July 2020.
  6. ^ a b c 今昔こんじゃく文字もじ鏡きょうとは [What is Mojikyō?] (in Japanese). Kinokuniya KK. Archived from the original on 5 February 2005. Retrieved 5 July 2020.
  7. ^ "Search: creator:"MOJIKYO Institute"". Internet Archive. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  8. ^ Takada, Tomokazu; Yada, Tsutomu; Saito, Tatsuya (18 September 2015). Proposal for hentaigana (PDF). Translated by Kobayashi, Tatsuo; Kobayashi, Daniel. Information Processing Society of Japan. L2/15-239. Retrieved 5 July 2020 – via Unicode Consortium.
  9. ^ Hiura, Hideki; Kobayashi, Tatsuo; et al. (31 October 2003). Ideograph Variation Selector and Variation Collection Identifier. Open Internationalization Initiative. L2/03-413. Retrieved 5 July 2020 – via Unicode Consortium.
  10. ^ Takada, Tomokazu [高田たかだ智和ともかず]; Oda, Tetsuji [織田おだ哲治てつじ]; et al. (26 August 2013). 平成へいせい25年度ねんど第だい3回かい文字もじ情報じょうほう検討けんとうサブワーキンググループ議事ぎじ録ろく [Meeting Minutes of the Third Character Information Examination Sub-Working Group of 2013 (Heisei 25)] (PDF). Information Technology Promotion Agency, Government of Japan (in Japanese). p. 2. Retrieved 6 July 2020. 文字もじ鏡きょう研究けんきゅう会かいの関係かんけい者しゃにヒアリングしたところ、オランダから提案ていあんされたWG2 N36981には文字もじ鏡きょうのフォントが使用しようされているが、文字もじ鏡きょう研究けんきゅう会かいは関与かんよしておらず、提案ていあん内容ないようについても疑問ぎもんがあるとのことであった。[According to an interview with a representative of the Mojikyō Institute, a Mojikyō font is used in WG2 N36981 proposed by the Netherlands, but the Mojikyō Institute itself is not involved with the proposal; it furthermore has doubts about some of the content of that proposal.]
  11. ^ a b Suzuki, Toshiya [鈴木すずき俊哉としや] (30 July 2009). 統合とうごう漢字かんじに申請しんせいされた「殷いん周しゅう金文きんぶん集成しゅうせい引得」図形ずけい文字もじの調査ちょうさ [Investigation on Glyphs collected from "Index to Collection of Inscriptions of the Yin-Zhou Period" to submit to CJK Unified Ideographs]. IPSJ SIG Technical Report (in Japanese). 2009-DD-72 (7). Information Processing Society of Japan: 2 – via Internet Archive. しかし、拡張かくちょうCの標準ひょうじゅん化か作業さぎょうが8年ねんの長期ちょうきにわたり、また事後じご的てきに用例ようれいが必須ひっすとされたため、正式せいしきに公布こうふされた拡張かくちょうC漢字かんじの典拠てんきょは当初とうしょの典拠てんきょとはかなり異ことなるものとなっている。たとえば日本にっぽんでは当初とうしょは文字もじ鏡きょう研究けんきゅう会かいによって選定せんていされた1000文字もじ程度ていどの漢字かんじを申請しんせいしていた[。] [...] 典拠てんきょ用例ようれい確認かくにんは文字もじ鏡きょうとは独立どくりつに行おこなわれたため、字形じけいが文字もじ鏡きょう漢字かんじから変更へんこうされたものも多おおい。[As the standardization effort for CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C has been eight long years in the making and examples of kanji have been requested after their encoding, the officially promulgated Extension C kanji standard is quite different from the original standard. For example, we, the Government of Japan, initially applied for about 1,000 kanji selected by the Mojikyō Institute[.] [...] Since the verification of the kanji was performed independently of the Mojikyō Institute, the character shapes were often changed from Mojikyō's version of that same codepoint.]
  12. ^ Ishikawa, Tadahisa (25 May 1999). "パソコン悠悠ゆうゆう漢字かんじ術じゅつ 今昔こんじゃく文字もじ鏡きょう徹底てってい活用かつよう" [Kanji on your PC, Made Easy—The Complete Mojikyō Manual]. Mojikyō Institute. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  13. ^ MJ文字もじ情報じょうほう一覧いちらん表ひょう [Table of MJ Character Encodings] (in Japanese). Information Technology Promotion Agency. Archived from the original on 29 September 2018. Retrieved 5 July 2020.
  14. ^ "Unicode Standard Annex #45: U-source Ideographs". The Unicode Standard. Unicode Consortium.
  15. ^ "Appendix E: Han Unification History" (PDF). The Unicode Standard. Unicode Consortium. March 2020.
  16. ^ "CJK Extension C1 From Japan". Ideographic Rapporteur Group. IRG#19 N895 – via The Chinese University of Hong Kong's Department of Computer Science and Engineering. N895-Japan_C1
  17. ^ Cook, Richard (9 May 2007). Proposal to encode Tangut characters in UCS Plane 1 (PDF). UC Berkeley Script Encoding Initiative. p. 4. L2/07-143 – via Unicode Consortium.
  18. ^ Jenkins, John H.; Cook, Richard; Lunde, Ken, eds. (5 March 2020), "kIRG JSource", Unicode Standard Annex #38, Unicode Consortium
  19. ^ Kobayashi, Tatsuo (3 December 2001). "List of Japanese Ideographs which may be proposed in Extension-C". ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2/IRG N853.
  20. ^ a b Ken Lunde [@ken_lunde] (6 July 2020). "In particular, all 782 JK-prefixed ideographs are indeed from 今昔こんじゃく文字もじ鏡きょう per IRG N862. Most were encoded in #ExtensionC, and the stragglers were encoded in #ExtensionE." (Tweet). Retrieved 6 July 2020 – via Twitter.
  21. ^ Ken Lunde [@ken_lunde] (7 July 2020). "JK-prefixed J-Source ideographs came from 今昔こんじゃく文字もじ鏡きょう, which are in Extensions C and E (the mention of Extension D was simply that what became Extension E was originally targeted to become Extension D)" (Tweet). Archived from the original on 7 July 2020. Retrieved 6 July 2020 – via Twitter.
  22. ^ Ken Lunde [@ken_lunde] (7 July 2020). "367 JK-prefixed ideographs are in Extension C, and the remaining 415 are in Extension E." (Tweet). Retrieved 6 July 2020 – via Twitter.
  23. ^ "終戦しゅうせん宣言せんげん" [Announcement: The War is Over]. 青蛙あおがえる亭てい漢語かんご塾じゅく [Seiwatei's Kanji Cram School] (in Japanese) (28 January 2016 ed.). 21 July 2010. Retrieved 7 July 2020.
  24. ^ "データ・記事きじのライセンス" [License of our data and articles]. GlyphWiki (9 June 2010 ed.). Retrieved 6 July 2020. 今昔こんじゃく文字もじ鏡きょうおよびその関連かんれん製品せいひん、データは、そのライセンス上じょうグリフウィキには用もちいることができません。文字もじ鏡きょう番号ばんごう（独自どくじ部分ぶぶん）および文字もじ鏡きょうのフォントに収録しゅうろくされているグリフそのもの、およびそれを参照さんしょう、利用りようして作成さくせいしていると判断はんだんできる情報じょうほうは、グリフウィキに登録とうろくする際さいの典拠てんきょとすることはできませんので、ご協力きょうりょくをお願ねがいいたします。 [Konjaku Mojikyō and related products and associated data are licensed in such a way that they are incompatible with our above GlyphWiki license. Neither the number of the Mojikyō encoding slot, nor the appearance of the glyph itself in Mojikyō's fonts, nor any information whatsoever that can be judged to have been gathered by referring to a Mojikyō product, can be used when entering data into GlyphWiki. We absolutely cannot accept Mojikyō data. Please cooperate with us.]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ As yet, lacks a Unicode encoding, so is approximated here with CSS and U+30BB セ KATAKANA LETTER SE.
  2. ^ a b For Korean, Hanja are referred to. For Vietnamese, Chữ Nôm.
  3. ^ Download the file MojikyoCmap400ALL49TTF.7z from the official website
  4. ^ English name from the title of the window produced by running the executable; Japanese name from the icon of the executable.
  5. ^ Also called the "Mojikyō Cmap".
  6. ^ See the screenshots on the official website
  7. ^ Into the system fonts directory C:\Windows\Fonts.
  8. ^ As of 2019, the IRG rebranded as the Ideographic Research Group.
  9. ^ The history of the encoding of the Tangut script is quite complicated, see Tangut (Unicode block) § History for a full listing of all the related proposals and a timeline.
  10. ^ Ideographic Description Sequence: ⿰魚さかな嵐あらし
  11. ^ This is a column name in the Unihan database; ⟨J⟩ here is short for "Japanese glyph source". The full name of the column is kIRG_JSource. Under Han unification, there are nine such sources. See §3.1 of UAX#38 for a complete list and more information.
  12. ^ Other J-Source prefixes exist, such as J4, meaning the character originates from JIS X 0213:2004.
  13. ^ That is to say, a glyph made up of the same radicals in the same positions.
  14. ^ a b Errors in large collections of ideographs are, of course, not uncommon. Such errors even accidentally occur in well funded government-produced collections, such as the famous kanji from unknown sources in the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee's JIS X 0208 double-byte character encoding standard. All of these JIS X 0208 error kanji (Ghost characters, 幽霊ゆうれい文字もじ; e.g., 彁) have made their way into Unicode despite not being "real" kanji.
  15. ^ For proof, see the list in the Mojikyō Character Map, MOCHRMAP.EXE.
  16. ^ See also: fictitious entry; trap street.

External links[edit]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mojikyō&oldid=1186212861"