Since doing research on writing systems for my thesis back in ‘06, I’ve wondered why Japanese uses the simplified kanji 国. (It means country.) Since Japanese inherited the kanji characters from Chinese hundreds of years ago, and the simplification of Chinese didn’t occur until this century (1940s? 50s? My memory is a little fuzzy), it was a bit of mystery as to why the simplified form carried over to Japanese.

I found the answer—Shinjitai. However, I noted that the Wikipedia (Wikipedia’s ruining everything!) page says that the article cites no references. Hmm.