stalled revisions could proceed. The major reforms were: —alignment of kana usage with modern pronunciation, replacing the old historical kana usage (1946); promulgation of various restricted sets of kanji: (1946), a collection of 1850 characters for use in schools, textbooks, etc.; kanji to be used in schools (1949); an additional collection of , which, supplementing the tōyō kanji, could be used in personal names (1951); simplifications of various complex kanji letter-forms . At one stage, an advisor in the Occupation administration proposed a wholesale conversion to rōmaji, but it was not endorsed by other specialists and did not proceed. In addition, the practice of writing horizontally in a right-to-left direction was generally replaced by left-to-right writing. The right-to-left order was considered a special case of vertical writing, with columns one character high, rather than horizontal writing per se; it was used for single lines of text on signs, etc. (e.g., the station sign at Tokyo reads ). The post-war reforms have mostly survived, although some of the restrictions have been relaxed. The replacement of the tōyō kanji in 1981 with the 1,945 —a modification of the tōyō kanji—was accompanied by a change from "restriction" to "recommendation", and in general the educational authorities have become less active in further script reform. In 2004, the , maintained by the Ministry of Justice for use in personal names, was significantly enlarged. The jōyō kanji list was extended to 2,136 characters in 2010. Romanization There are a number of methods of rendering Japanese in Roman letters. The Hepburn method of romanization, designed for English speakers, is a de facto standard widely used inside and outside Japan. The Kunrei-shiki system has a better correspondence with Japanese phonology, which makes it easier for native speakers to learn. It is officially endorsed by the Ministry of Education and often used by non-native speakers who are learning Japanese as a second language. Other systems of romanization include Nihon-shiki, JSL, and Wāpuro rōmaji. Lettering styles Shodō Edomoji Minchō East Asian sans-serif typeface Variant writing systems Gyaru-moji Hentaigana Man'yōgana See also Genkō yōshi (graph paper for writing Japanese) Iteration mark (Japanese duplication marks) Japanese typographic symbols (non-kana, non-kanji symbols) Japanese Braille Japanese language and computers Japanese manual syllabary Chinese writing system Okinawan writing system Kaidā glyphs (Yonaguni) Siddhaṃ script (Indic alphabet used for Buddhist scriptures) References Sources External links The Modern Japanese Writing System: an excerpt from Literacy and Script