This study reveals the varieties of Sino-Japanese orthography as well as the elimination and consolidation of certain orthographies in contemporary usage of Japanese. Using morphologically annotated corpora of modern and contemporary Japanese, I conducted a survey and analysis of different orthographies of Sino-Japanese words. By examining the number of different orthographies and the usage rates of individual ones, the following three points became clear regarding 2,000 words used in the modern and contemporary eras: 1) There are fewer orthographies used to write a word in the contemporary era than the modern era; 2) Orthographies that disappeared in the contemporary era were used frequently in the modern era. This not only means that the general orthographies used in the modern era were eliminated, but also that the orthographic standards have changed; and 3) The elimination and alteration of orthographies occurred with certain words and not others in the modern era because of an emphasis placed upon practicality and reasonability of language in the wake of modern school system and the rise of typography in publishing. In addition, the eliminations and shifts that occurred after the Showa era were greatly influenced by national language policies.

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We have developed and released HAGOROMO, a usage database of function words in Japanese, aiming to support Japanese language teachers, especially non-native teachers overseas, and learners at the intermediate and advanced levels. The system allows users to search function words, which are essential for Japanese language education/learning, and access authentic example sentences extracted from spoken and written language corpora. It is currently available in two forms̶as a web-based system (available at http://jreadability. net/hagoromo-dev), and as a downloadable Microsoft Excel data file. The number of headwords is 1,848; these were collected with reference to five pieces of reference literature including the previous JLPT test content specifications. The example sentences were extracted from four spoken language corpora including Meidai Dialogue Corpus, and four other written language corpora such as CASTEL/J. The levels of difficulty of the headwords were determined by the subjective judgments of five Japanese language teachers, each with experience of more than ten years.

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This paper gives a description of data visualization by SPSS and specifically focuses on the graph drawing function. It deals with three graphs, which are believed to be fundamental in the quantitative study of language. They are the histogram, boxplot, and scatter plot. The outcome of the research on text difficulty of corpus data conducted by Lee, Hasebe, and Kubo (2016) is used as data. The data used is posted on the Web so we expect SPSS users to experiment with it.

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