“Pseudo-Chinese”: New Japanese Social Media App Only Allows Kanji

A new social media app for Japanese users dares you to ditch kana by allowing only kanji input.

How good is your knowledge of kanji? Could you get by in Japanese by kanji alone? A new social media app aims to test that with a unique new feature: it forbids kana input, allowing only Chinese characters.

Written Japanese consists of three components: kanji, Chinese-derived ideographs, plus the two kana syllabaries, hiragana and katakana. Hiragana generally represents grammatical elements and certain common words, while katakana is used for loan words, onomatopoeia, and emphasis.

There have been attempts to change this beautiful but admittedly complex system over the years. All of them have failed. One group that wanted Japanese to shift into using romaji (Latin characters) admitted defeat last year.

The long and the short of it is, modern Japanese uses a combination of all three writing systems to represent the written language. There’s no such thing as writing Japanese without kana.

Until now. Independent developer Daiki Yuasa (@app_asa on X) has re-released 対多 (pronounced “Tsuita” — get it? Get it?), a social media app that prevents entering kana and allows only kanji. The app bills itself as the “Pseudo-Chinese forum” (偽中国語掲示板…