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On the basis of the lexical corpus created by Amano and Kondo (2000), using the Asahi newspaper, the present study provides frequencies of occurrence for units of Japanese phonemes, morae, and syllables. Among the five vowels, /a/ (23.42%), /i/ (21.54%), /u/ (23.47%), and /o/ (20.63%) showed similar frequency rates, whereas /e/ (10.94%) was less frequent. Among the 12 consonants, /k/ (17.24%), /t/ (15.53%), and /r/ (13.11%) were used often, whereas /p/ (0.60%) and /b/ (2.43%) appeared far less frequently. Among the contracted sounds, /sj/ (36.44%) showed the highest frequency, whereas /mj/ (0.27%) rarely appeared. Among the five long vowels, /aR/ (34.4%) was used most frequently, whereas /uR/ (12.11%) was not used so often. The special sound /N/ appeared very frequently in Japanese. The syllable combination /k/+V+/N/ (19.91%) appeared most frequently among syllabic combinations with the nasal /N/. The geminate (or voiceless obstruent) /Q/, when placed before the four consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, and /s/, appeared 98.87% of the time, but the remaining 1.13% did not follow the definition. The special sounds /R/, /N/, and /Q/ seem to appear very frequently in Japanese, suggesting that they are not special in terms of frequency counts. The present study further calculated frequencies for the 33 newly and officially listed morae/syllables, which are used particularly for describing alphabetic loanwords. In addition, the top 20 bi-mora frequency combinations are reported. Files of frequency indexes may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at http://www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

On the basis of calculations using the latest lexical database produced by Amano and Kondo (2000), the fourth edition of a Web-accessible database of characteristics of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji was produced by including the mathematical concepts of entropy, redundancy, and symmetry and by replacing selected indexes found in previous editions (Tamaoka, Kirsner, Yanase, Miyaoka, & Kawakami, 2002). The kanji database in the fourth edition introduces seven new figures for kanji characteristics: (1) printed frequency, (2) lexical productivity, (3) accumulative lexical productivity, (4) symmetry for lexical productivity, (5) entropy, (6) redundancy, and (7) numbers of meanings for On-readings and Kun-readings. The file of the fourth edition of the kanji database may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive, http://www.psychonomics.org/archive/.

In 1981, the Japanese government published a list of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji (Jooyoo Kanji-hyo), including specifications of pronunciation. This list was established as the standard for kanji usage in print. The database for 1,945 basic Japanese kanji provides 30 cells that explain in detail the various characteristics of kanji. Means, standard deviations, distributions, and information related to previous research concerning these kanji are provided in this paper. The database is saved as a Microsoft Excel 2000 file for Windows. This kanji database is accessible on the Web site of the Oxford Text Archive, Oxford University (http://ota.ahds.ac.uk). Using this database, researchers and educators will be able to conduct planned experiments and organize classroom instruction on the basis of the known characteristics of selected kanji.