Jōyō Kanji List — Elementary School Readings & Stroke Counts (Grades 1–2)

Side Note — Why Do Kanji Have Both On'yomi and Kun'yomi Readings?

Japanese kanji carry multiple readings because Japan had no native writing system before kanji arrived from China. The reading that preserved the original Chinese pronunciation became the on'yomi, while the kun'yomi paired the kanji's meaning with a native Japanese word that already existed — for instance, matching the character 山 (which means "mountain") with the existing Japanese word "yama." Because a single kanji ended up serving both as a symbol of meaning and a symbol of sound, Japanese developed its distinctive system of multiple readings per character.

On'yomi readings themselves come in several historical layers, known as go-on, kan-on, and tō-on. This reflects the fact that kanji were imported from China across several different eras and regions, rather than all at once — go-on arriving around the 5th–6th centuries, kan-on via Tang-dynasty embassies in the 7th–9th centuries, and tō-on later still. The character 行, for example, retains three on'yomi readings — gyō (go-on), kō (kan-on), and an (tō-on, as in angya, "pilgrimage") — each a fossil of a different wave of transmission still embedded in the language today.

The grade-level kanji allocation chart is a table, set by Japan's Ministry of Education in its official curriculum guidelines, assigning the 1,026 kyōiku kanji to specific grades across six years of elementary school. Lower grades focus on kanji with fewer strokes and everyday relevance (一, 二, 三, 日, 月, 火, and so on), while more strokes and increasingly abstract meanings appear in later grades. The allocation isn't purely ordered by difficulty either — it's also coordinated with what students are learning in other subjects, such as math, science, and social studies, at each grade level.