Japanese children learn a complex writing system: about 2,000 Kanji in 4,000 readings, 110 Hiragana and Katakana signs, Roomaji, and Arabic numerals, as well as the proper uses of all these various scripts. The most important task of primary and secondary education in Japan, as in any other nation, is to equip all students with functional literacy. Accordingly, the national language, namely Japanese reading and writing, is by far the most important school subject and is given the largest number of class periods in both primary and secondary school.
Before considering schoolchildren, let us consider preschoolers, many of whom pick up at home rudimentary reading, especially Hiragana.
Preschoolers spend all their waking hours acquiring speech along with knowledge about the world. The word acquire is used to suggest that preschoolers pick up speech and knowledge informally, without specific instruction, by growing up in an environment filled with speech. They can acquire rudimentary reading in the same manner. In Japan almost all preschoolers pick up, with little or no instruction, some Hiragana at home and in kindergarten by being exposed to TV and printed materials such as comic strips, story books, letter blocks, and labels on objects. Once they pick up most of the 71 basic and secondary Hiragana, they should be able to negotiate simple stories for young children.
The two major scripts in Japan are Kanji and Kana. It is generally assumed that Kanji, because of their large number and complex shapes, are more difficult to learn than Kana, and so Kanji are taught to children after Kana. Is the assumption justified? This question has been tackled in several studies.
In one study, 3- and 4-year olds learned to read aloud individual Hiragana
or Katakana signs, e.g., 
ku and Kanji words 
kawa ('river')
and 
karui ('light') (Steinberg and Oka 1978). They learned
the meaningful Kanji words better than the meaningless Kana signs. In another
study, when tested one week later, 3- and 4-year olds also remembered the
Kanji words better than the Kana signs (Oka et al. 1979). In these studies,
individual Kanji were meaningful, but Kana signs were meaningless.
When individual Kanji and Kana signs were equated in meaningfulness,
then the learning of the two types was similar (Haryu 1989). Imai (1979)
used test materials that were monosyllabic words written either in Kanji
or Katakana. His test words were ki ('tree'), to ('door'),
me ('eye'), ha ('teeth'), and su ('bird nest'), which
in Katakana were 
and in Kanji were 
. The words in the two scripts
were learned almost with equal ease. In another experiment with kindergarteners,
the highly pictographic oracle-bone characters
(table 3-1) were learned faster than their stylized (far less pictographic)
modern counterparts (Ozawa and Nomura 1981).
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