Abstract
It is one of the fundamental works to read the Japanese historical documents in Japanese historical studies. Most of these documents are written with "kuzushi-ji" characters and reading the documents needs considerable labor even for experts. Because of this background, we have been developing the Japanese historical character recognition system for the reading support system for Japanese historical documents. This recognition system demonstrates mostly good recognition accuracy but it may fall in case of recognizing characters which are blurred and also have fractures. In this research, we apply "SOM template" which is used in a recognition of ornament letters to the historical character recognition and try to reduce decline of the recognition accuracy.
