Tōyō kanji

The tōyō kanji (当用漢字; lit. "general-use kanji") are those kanji listed on the Tōyō kanji hyō (当用漢字表; literally "list of general-use kanji"), which was released by the Japanese Ministry of Education (文部省) on 16 November 1946, following a reform of kanji characters of Chinese origin in the Japanese language. The intention of the tōyō list was to declare which kanji could be used in official government documents.

The 1,850-character list was not meant to be exhaustive, as many characters that were in common use at the time, and are today, were not included. It was meant as a baseline for satisfactory functional literacy in Japanese at a secondary education level, as all of the listed characters were to be taught nationwide in compulsory education.

They were replaced in 1981 by the jōyō kanji, which initially included 1,945 characters, but was expanded to 2,136 characters in 2010 following several revisions.

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