Moji

Moji, written as 文字 in Japanese, is a term used to refer to any character used in writing systems. It encompasses kanji (漢字), kana (仮名) — hiragana and katakana — as well as numerals and punctuation. The word moji is the kun'yomi reading of 文字; in practice, it is used to talk about a single character or a set of characters, for example in language education or typography.

Kanji are logographic characters borrowed from Chinese that convey meaning; kana are syllabic scripts that represent sounds. Together with digits and punctuation, these forms are all considered moji. Modern Japanese typically uses about 2,000 kanji from the jouyō (common-use) set for daily reading, alongside the two kana scripts.

In computing, moji are represented as code points in character encoding schemes such as Unicode; software must handle mojibake—garbled text that results from misapplied encodings. Mojibake arises when text encoded in one character set is decoded using another, leading to unreadable output.

The concept of moji covers both everyday writing and the technical aspects of text processing. Understanding moji is essential for literacy in Japanese, as well as for the design of fonts, keyboards, and software that handles multilingual text. See also: kanji, hiragana, katakana, Unicode, mojibake.