If we conflate the prevailing stereotypes relating to reading and writing in Japan, we come up with an image of a “typical Japanese” who is highly literate, has mastered the complexities of Japan's writing system with ease (and may wear glasses or contacts because of it), reads manga (comics) on trains when young and pocket paperbacks or newspapers when older, and writes with a brush and/or draws characters in the air. Some of these are merely comical; others contain a grain (or more) of truth. In this chapter we will look at whether these typical views stand up to scrutiny and why things might be changing. The manga-reading student on the train is these days just as likely to be staring at the screen of a mobile phone instead, either chatting with friends through SMS or downloading i-mode Internet pages, before going home to type assignments on a computer: reading and writing still, but in a form mediated by contemporary multimedia technologies.

We begin this chapter with a general description of the Japanese writing system, maligned and praised by Japanese and non-Japanese alike as possibly the world's most complex orthography.

The Japanese writing system

The Japanese writing system has been variously described as innately superior to all other writing systems (Suzuki 1975), inordinately difficult, complex and “perversely involved” (Miller 1982: 172 and 178) and a whole range of things in between, but usually with an emphasis on its complexity and, by extension, difficulty.