Table Of ContentABC DICTIONARY OF
SINO-JAPANESE
READINGS
Victor H. Mair
ABC Dictionary of
Sino-Japanese Readings
ABC CHINESE DICTIONARY SERIES
Victor H. Mair, General Editor
The ABC Chinese Dictionary Series aims to provide a complete set of convenient and reliable reference
tools for all those who need to deal with Chinese words and characters. A unique feature of the series
is the adoption of a strict alphabetical order, the fastest and most user-friendly way to look up words in
a Chinese dictionary. Most volumes contain graphically oriented indices to assist in finding characters
whose pronunciation is not known. The ABC dictionaries and compilations rely on the best expertise
available in China and North America and are based on the application of radically new strategies for the
study of Sinitic languages and the Chinese writing system, including the first clear distinction between
the etymology of the words, on the one hand, and the evolution of shapes, sounds, and meanings of
characters, on the other. While aiming for conciseness and accuracy, series volumes also strive to apply
the highest standards of lexicography in all respects, including compatibility with computer technology
for information processing.
Other titles in the series
ABC Chinese-English Dictionary (desk reference and pocket editions)
Edited by John DeFrancis
ABC Dictionary of Chinese Proverbs
Edited by John S. Rohsenow
ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary
Edited by John DeFrancis
An Alphabetical Index to the Hanyu Da Cidian
Edited by Victor H. Mair
A Handbook of 'Phags-pa Chinese
W. South Coblin
ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese
Axel Schuessler
Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese:
A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa
Axel Schuessler
ABC English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary
Edited by John DeFrancis and Zhang Yanyin
ABC Dictionary of Ancient Japanese Phonograms
John R. Bentley
ABC Dictionary of
Sino-Japanese Readings
Victor H. Mair
University of Hawai‘i Press
Honolulu
© 2016 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
21 20 19 18 17 16 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-0-8248-2331-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and
meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Council on Library Resources.
Print-ready copy prepared by Thomas E. Bishop of Wenlin Institute, Inc.
To all the great Japanese Sinologists past and present
and
To Patricia Crosby, éditeur extraordinaire
CONTENTS
Preface ix
How to Use This Dictionary xiii
ABC Dictionary of Sino-Japanese Readings 1
PREFACE
Few books that have been published will have undergone a longer gestation period
than this one. Feeling the need for an easy-to-use tool that would enable Sinologists
and other China specialists to look up the Japanese readings of Chinese characters
by their Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) pronunciation, I began compiling this
dictionary sometime around 1995. By 1997, the work was essentially finished, and
I delivered the manuscript to the University of Hawai‘i Press not long thereafter. It
was reviewed and accepted for publication in short order and was scheduled to come
out in February 2001. The dictionary was advertised in Press catalogs and actually
sold hundreds of copies; I even saw it listed in library catalogs in various universities
as I traveled around the world in the following years. Most unfortunately, it never
appeared.
What happened is that, in the final review for the Press, a colleague suggested
that it would be nice to add the special readings for proper names. Wishing to be
accommodating and wanting this dictionary to be maximally useful, I agreed to add
the special readings. That was in the year 2000. It is now 2016, so the dictionary got
stuck for sixteen years because of that reviewer’s suggestion. I had put so much effort
into the initial compilation that somehow I just could not bring myself to confront the
material all over again. Although, with the help of others, some of whom I’ll name
below, I made sporadic efforts to complete the promised additions (which probably
only amounted to one tenth of the whole), other commitments and a lack of resolve
meant that I was unable to finalize the dictionary until now.
Regardless of the torturesome delay for the last decade and a half, my aim has
always been the same: to produce a reference tool that would permit Chinese scholars
to look up the Japanese readings of Sinitic characters by their Mandarin pronuncia-
tions. I recall that, as a graduate student, this was something that I often wished had
been available to me. Fully realizing the excellence and abundance of Japanese Sinol-
ogy and Chinese studies in general, I was keenly aware of the necessity for consulting
and citing research in Japanese. The problem is that, although I knew the sounds
of the terms and names in Chinese, I did not know them in Japanese. Furthermore,
Japanese indices and reference works were (and still are) arranged by pronunciation.
Consequently, if you do not know the Japanese pronunciations, you simply cannot
look things up in most works of Japanese scholarship directly. This means that, to
find things in Japanese sources, we first had to look up the sound of each character by
the painful means of radical plus residual strokes and then use the Japanese sounds to
find particular items—a clumsy, time-consuming, two-stage process. Of course, after
we had taken two or three years of Japanese language, we knew the pronunciations
of a thousand or so characters, but that was not nearly enough for the type of Sino-
logical research in which we were engaged. Furthermore, Japanese kanji usually have
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