Since April 2020, Japanese elementary schools have taught 1,026 kanji, 80 in the first year and then 160, 200, 202, 193 and 191, under the Course of Study that Japan's education ministry, MEXT, published on 31 March 2017. We compared the new table with the old one character by character. It added 20 kanji, all used in prefecture names, and moved 37 others between years: 32 to a later year and 5 to an earlier one.
All 1,026 are on the 2,136-character Jōyō list of kanji for general use, and the other 1,110 are left to secondary school. The table before 2020 held 1,006, the same characters in the 1998 and 2008 Courses of Study.
The net change hides a reshuffle across the later school years
MEXT's side-by-side comparison of the 2008 and 2017 Courses of Study prints both tables. We parsed them and diffed the two. The 20 additions, 茨 媛 岡 潟 岐 熊 香 佐 埼 崎 滋 鹿 縄 井 沖 栃 奈 梨 阪 阜, all went to the fourth year. Five kanji already in the table, 賀, 群, 徳 and 富 from the fifth year and 城 from the sixth, moved earlier to join them in the fourth. All five are also used in prefecture names. Nothing was removed.
| Change in 2020 | Kanji | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Added to year 4 | 茨媛岡潟岐熊香佐埼崎滋鹿縄井沖栃奈梨阪阜 | 20 |
| Year 5 to year 4 | 賀群徳富 | 4 |
| Year 6 to year 4 | 城 | 1 |
| Year 4 to year 5 | 囲紀喜救型航告殺士史象賞貯停堂得毒費粉脈歴 | 21 |
| Year 4 to year 6 | 胃腸 | 2 |
| Year 5 to year 6 | 恩券承舌銭退敵俵預 | 9 |
So the fourth year took in 25 kanji and passed 23 on, and grew by only two, from 200 to 202. The fifth year went from 185 to 193 and the sixth from 181 to 191. The first three years did not change. MEXT's own questions and answers on the revision give the same figures: 25 prefecture kanji in the fourth year, 20 of them new, and 32 kanji moved between the fourth, fifth and sixth years. Pupils in the fourth year met the new table from April 2018 under transitional rules, two years before it became law.
The link to the 2010 Jōyō revision runs through prefecture names
Eleven of the 20 new elementary kanji, 岡 阪 熊 鹿 梨 阜 茨 媛 埼 奈 栃, had joined the Jōyō list only in 2010. MEXT's summary of that revision says the list grew from 1,945 to 2,136 characters, with 196 added and 5 removed, and that kanji used only for proper nouns were left out except for those used in prefecture names, which were added as an exception. The other nine of the 20 were already on the list. A paper from a MEXT working group in May 2026 said the allocation of kanji to school years would stay as it is in the next Course of Study; that was a draft, not a decision.
The margin around the printed Jōyō forms takes in 叱 and 頬
The 2010 Jōyō table prints 𠮟, a form outside Unicode's basic plane that many fonts and keyboards lack. Its own notes then say that 「「𠮟」と「叱」は本来別字とされるが，その使用実態から見て，異体の関係にある同字と認めることができる」: the two were originally distinct but, given how they are used, can be treated as the same character. A second note says that using the forms built into computers, 「頬・賭・剥」 for the printed 頰, 賭 and 剝, is acceptable, 「差し支えない」. The table is a guide for general writing, a 目安, not a ban on anything else.
Our checker misread variant forms accepted by the Jōyō list
Our kanji grade lookup matched MEXT's table on all 1,026 elementary kanji and the Jōyō list on all 2,136, with no mismatch in either. Until 2 October 2026, though, it read 叱, 頬, 剥 and 填 as outside the Jōyō list, so 剥がす came back as having no Jōyō kanji at all, and its own sample of 𠮟 and 叱 showed half the text off the list. It also described 28 standard Jōyō kanji, 横 among them, as variants of their own older forms. It now counts the forms the table accepts and says why.
The boundary for children's names follows a third list
A child's given name may use any kanji on the Jōyō list or on the name kanji list, according to the Ministry of Justice. That list sits in an appendix to the family-register rules, headed 別表第三 in the ministry's current table; the ministry's explanatory page still calls it 別表第２. The ministry added 勒 on 26 June 2026, Kyodo reported. Its table draws almost every character as an image, so we counted only the first part: 652 characters, 勒 the newest. The 212 variant forms that usually make up the rest of the total come from KANJIDIC2, a community dictionary file, not from a count of the ministry's table. Our guide to the name registry rules covers the 2025 change to registering readings.
The match of JLPT levels to kanji rests on unofficial lists
Many sites sort kanji into the five levels of the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test used since 2010. The test's organisers say in their FAQ that "publishing 'Test Content Specifications' containing a list of vocabulary, kanji and grammar items was not necessarily appropriate", and KANJIDIC2 notes that "No official kanji lists are available for the new levels." The old four-level test, before 2010, did have official lists. A five-level list on any site is that site's own grouping.
The overlap with Chinese standard forms thins after the first year
We used OpenCC, an open-source converter, to map each of the 1,026 kanji to its Traditional form (used in Taiwan and Hong Kong) and its Simplified form (used on the mainland). By that mapping, 645, or 62.9%, have the same character code in all three; 104 differ from all three, among them 円, 気, 広, 駅 and 図; and 331 differ from the mainland's Simplified form. This compares character codes, not glyph shapes, and OpenCC's choices were not checked against each place's official character standard.
The share is highest in the first year, 72 of the 80 kanji, and lower in every later year: 102 of 160 in the second, 140 of 200 in the third, 124 of 202 in the fourth, 93 of 193 in the fifth and 114 of 191 in the sixth.
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