Japanese losing ability to write 'kanji' due to emails Of those to replied to a survey by the Cultural Affairs Agency, 66.5 per cent said they feared they were forgetting all the required strokes in some of the characters, up more than 25 percentage points from the last survey, which was conducted 10 years ago. Even more worrying for purists of the Japanese language, which uses thousands of characters originally from China, is that 42 per cent of the people also said that it was "a bother" to write by hand, up more than 10 percentage points from the last study. "This trend will certainly become stronger and be a serious problem for children in learning Japanese," the Yomiuri newspaper reported the agency as commenting. The agency reported a sharp increase in the number of people blaming their everyday use of emails for their declining kanji skills. Nearly 80 per cent of people in their 40s said modern communications technology was the root cause of the problem. In 2010, the government added 200 new kanji to the list of characters designated for everyday use, bringing the total to 2,136. One of the most complicated additions to the list was the character "utsu," meaning depression, that requires no fewer than 29 strokes to complete accurately. That list is far from exhaustive, however, and around 13,000 characters are recognised by the Japanese body that oversees the language. That figure pales against the 100,000 characters that have been identified in Chinese dictionaries. Concerned that future generations will be unable to correctly write the Japanese language, the agency said, "We must seriously consider how children, who have not yet mastered Japanese to a sufficient level, should be taught to use computers."