On the expression of place name and JIS Chinese characters.

Abstract

The greater part of place name in Japan is expressed in Chinese characters. The care of place names necessary for the compilation of charts and sailing directions has been made using hand-written cards until now. To maintain up-to-date name cards, much labor has been required and the exactness and efficiency necessary for maintenance by computer processing has been expected for a long time. The use of Chinese characters in many computer systems has gradually been popularized during the last several years; hence, an investigation of Chinese characters used for the expression of place names has been made to explore the possibility of computer use. The contents and results of the investigation are presented in this report. The Chinese characters used by a computer are referred to in the table named “Code of the Japanese Graphic Character Set for Information Interchange” as Japanese Industrial Standard JIS-C-6226. The table contains 6,353 Chinese characters used in ordinary Japanese sentences. The results of the investigation show that the number of kinds of Chinese characters used for the expression of place names is around 3,000. Around 2,600 kinds of characters, among them, are included in the table. The sufficient possibility of using a computer for place names after the adoption of around 50 additional characters to such a table is shown. The frequency of use of the remaining 400 characters is extremely low. Besides this, several points regarding this kind of investigation for place names found during the process are mentioned.