Why are Japanese fonts different to Chinese?


I’ve noticed that Japanese and Chinese writing tends to use different fonts.
Japanese fonts tend use wider lines and more curves. Chinese fonts tend to use
narrow angular lines and there are differences at the end of strokes as well.

I’ve noticed this even in Japanese where there are multilingual translations.
There are differences even when the Chinese (traditional or simplified
characters) text uses the same character as the Kanji. This seems to occur
everywhere, from train stations to store menus. Often the different fonts will
be displayed together on the same screen, page, or sign.

Is there a specific linguistic, cultural, or historical reason for this? Are
Japanese and Chinese fonts different internationally or is this only in Japan?

It does make it easier to distinguish Japanese and Chinese texts but I suspect
this is incidental and there’s another reason for it. Japanese and Chinese
texts can be differentiated due to differences in vocabulary and whether they
use Kana. We don’t use different fonts for other languages that use the same
writing system (for example we write English and Italian in the same fonts).
This is different to using foreign words in italics (Latin in English) or
Katakana (English in Japanese) as these fonts are used entirely separately for
translations and are not intermingled.

For a recent example, this is a calendar produced by a Japanese company.
Chinese and Japanese versions clearly have different fonts whereas English,
French, and German have the same font for the same characters.

[![HORIBA Calendar
2019](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zdUyy.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zdUyy.jpg)




I assume you're specifically talking about kanji/hanzi glyphs. (Hiragana are
obviously more cursive.) Basically the overall appearances of typical Chinese
hanzi and Japanese kanji fonts are not significantly different in terms of
line width, roundness, etc., just as English "A", French "A" and German "A"
are rendered the same. If you compare recent professionally-made pamphlets of
both languages from, say, Tokyo Disney Land, you should notice almost no
difference.

If you noticed some difference, it's probably because it is hard for a
designer to find a Chinese font that looks similar to the Japanese font they
want to use. While ordinary Japanese designers have lots of Japanese fonts
with lots of Japanese kanji, they cannot use them to produce natural-looking
Chinese sentences, and vice versa, because there are large regional variants
for many kanji/hanzi. As a consequence, they often have to choose a Chinese
font that looks different from the one used in the Japanese version. It's very
easy to find fonts that can render all major Western languages, but finding a
good-looking "Unicode" font that satisfies both Japanese and Chinese readers
is still difficult. Thanks to Adobe and Google, we now have at least one
reasonable free font that offers consistent look across CJK languages. From
Adobe Typekit Blog:

> ### [Introducing Source Han Sans: An open source Pan-CJK
> typeface](https://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sans/)
>
> Source Han Sans, available in seven weights, is a typeface family which
> provides full support for Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and
> Simplified Chinese, all in one font.
>
> * * *
>
> With Ryoko’s designs in progress, we knew that to develop a truly successful
> Pan-CJK font, we would require expertise that could be found only in type
> foundries with years of in-country design experience. We chose to partner
> with Iwata to expand our Japanese glyph selection. In Korea, we went with
> Sandoll Communication, who also designed the Korean hangul (the native
> alphabet of the Korean language) and in China, we partnered with our
> longtime friends at Changzhou Sinotype. Our project had now grown to become
> a collaborative effort between five companies — something somewhat
> unprecedented in the world of type design.
>
> Why was it important to get this expertise? Well, the writing systems for
> each language, particularly their ideographs that are based on historical
> Chinese forms, took different paths over time. While some characters
> remained unchanged and common across the languages, others morphed into
> regional variations. One can see these in the glyphs represented below.
> While the variations may be subtle, especially to the Western eye, they are
> very important to the users of each language.
>
> [![Glyphs of 曜 in different CJK
> languages](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ACfsZ.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ACfsZ.jpg)
>
> Ideograph U+66DC. From left to right: Simplified Chinese, Traditional
> Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

* * *

**EDIT** : In the case of that calendar, I'm pretty sure that consistency was
not intended in the first place, because Japanese was clearly the primary
language that should stand out. This Japanese font is probably
[筑紫Aオールド明朝](https://fontworks.co.jp/fontsearch/item?TsukuAOldMinPr6-B&word=%E3%80%8C%E9%81%8A%E3%81%B3%E9%81%93%E5%85%B7%E3%80%8D%E3%81%A7%E3%81%82%E3%82%8B%E3%81%B0%E3%81%8B%E3%82%8A%0A%E9%A3%BE%E3%82%89%E3%82%8C%E3%81%A6%E3%81%8D%E3%81%9F%E3%82%82%E3%81%AE%E3%82%82%E5%B0%91%E3%81%AA%E3%81%8F%E3%81%82%E3%82%8A%E3%81%BE%E3%81%9B%E3%82%93%E3%80%82),
a popular but expensive Japanese font with antique-looking stylized hiragana.
It's adding a good traditional flavor, but it's not a reasonable choice when
cross-language consistency is considered important. On the other hand, the
Chinese font seems to be some generic-looking serif to me. So this is what
happens when a Japanese designer does something mainly targeting at Japanese
audience :)




I assume you're specifically talking about kanji/hanzi glyphs. (Hiragana are
obviously more cursive.) Basically the overall appearances of typical Chinese
hanzi and Japanese kanji fonts are not significantly different in terms of
line width, roundness, etc., just as English "A", French "A" and German "A"
are rendered the same. If you compare recent professionally-made pamphlets of
both languages from, say, Tokyo Disney Land, you should notice almost no
difference.

If you noticed some difference, it's probably because it is hard for a
designer to find a Chinese font that looks similar to the Japanese font they
want to use. While ordinary Japanese designers have lots of Japanese fonts
with lots of Japanese kanji, they cannot use them to produce natural-looking
Chinese sentences, and vice versa, because there are large regional variants
for many kanji/hanzi. As a consequence, they often have to choose a Chinese
font that looks different from the one used in the Japanese version. It's very
easy to find fonts that can render all major Western languages, but finding a
good-looking "Unicode" font that satisfies both Japanese and Chinese readers
is still difficult. Thanks to Adobe and Google, we now have at least one
reasonable free font that offers consistent look across CJK languages. From
Adobe Typekit Blog:

> ### [Introducing Source Han Sans: An open source Pan-CJK
> typeface](https://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sans/)
>
> Source Han Sans, available in seven weights, is a typeface family which
> provides full support for Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and
> Simplified Chinese, all in one font.
>
> * * *
>
> With Ryoko’s designs in progress, we knew that to develop a truly successful
> Pan-CJK font, we would require expertise that could be found only in type
> foundries with years of in-country design experience. We chose to partner
> with Iwata to expand our Japanese glyph selection. In Korea, we went with
> Sandoll Communication, who also designed the Korean hangul (the native
> alphabet of the Korean language) and in China, we partnered with our
> longtime friends at Changzhou Sinotype. Our project had now grown to become
> a collaborative effort between five companies — something somewhat
> unprecedented in the world of type design.
>
> Why was it important to get this expertise? Well, the writing systems for
> each language, particularly their ideographs that are based on historical
> Chinese forms, took different paths over time. While some characters
> remained unchanged and common across the languages, others morphed into
> regional variations. One can see these in the glyphs represented below.
> While the variations may be subtle, especially to the Western eye, they are
> very important to the users of each language.
>
> [![Glyphs of 曜 in different CJK
> languages](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ACfsZ.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ACfsZ.jpg)
>
> Ideograph U+66DC. From left to right: Simplified Chinese, Traditional
> Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

* * *

**EDIT** : In the case of that calendar, I'm pretty sure that consistency was
not intended in the first place, because Japanese was clearly the primary
language that should stand out. This Japanese font is probably
[筑紫Aオールド明朝](https://fontworks.co.jp/fontsearch/item?TsukuAOldMinPr6-B&word=%E3%80%8C%E9%81%8A%E3%81%B3%E9%81%93%E5%85%B7%E3%80%8D%E3%81%A7%E3%81%82%E3%82%8B%E3%81%B0%E3%81%8B%E3%82%8A%0A%E9%A3%BE%E3%82%89%E3%82%8C%E3%81%A6%E3%81%8D%E3%81%9F%E3%82%82%E3%81%AE%E3%82%82%E5%B0%91%E3%81%AA%E3%81%8F%E3%81%82%E3%82%8A%E3%81%BE%E3%81%9B%E3%82%93%E3%80%82),
a popular but expensive Japanese font with antique-looking stylized hiragana.
It's adding a good traditional flavor, but it's not a reasonable choice when
cross-language consistency is considered important. On the other hand, the
Chinese font seems to be some generic-looking serif to me. So this is what
happens when a Japanese designer does something mainly targeting at Japanese
audience :)

