Top Lang Disorders Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 121–132 Copyright c 2014 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Developmental Reading Disorders in Japan— Prevalence, Profiles, and Possible Mechanisms Yumiko Tanaka Welty, Lise Menn, and Noriko Oishi Japan has been considered dyslexia-free because of the nature of the orthography, which con- sists of the visually simple kana syllabary and some thousands of visually complex, logographic kanji characters. It is true that few children struggle with learning kana, which provide consistent mappings between symbols and their pronunciation. Indeed, most children can read most of the kana by age 6. However, many Japanese children struggle with reading the kanji, which represent most of the content words in a text; in addition to their visual complexity and impoverished or nonexistent phonological information, kanji are difficult because they typically have several pronunciations and multiple meanings, depending on the context. Because kanji must be learned semantically rather than phonologically, many people believe that Japanese dyslexia is due to visuospatial rather than phonological processing impairments. We sketch the complex psycholin- guistic demands of retrieving the correct pronunciations for kanji, especially in kanji compound words. Some individuals have extreme difficulty in learning the correspondences between these symbols and their sounds; whether these difficulties are visual, phonological, or both is an urgent topic for further research. After introducing Japanese orthography, we present 2 case studies. The first is a profile of a boy we observed from ages 7 to 20 years with difficulties in learning both kana and kanji. The second is a case study of using an interactive reading intervention for a fifth- grade boy with dyslexia. This program was designed to reduce decoding and fluency problems by teaching the meanings and pronunciations in phrasal context rather than in vocabulary lists. We propose that some of the dyslexias in Japanese may not be the same as any type of dyslexia that has been reported for learners of alphabetic writing systems. In addition, we emphasize the need for SLPs in Japan to establish new policies that support collaborative relationships with teachers and other professionals so that they can work in schools to identify and help children with spoken and written language problems. Key words: dyslexia, interactive reading intervention, Japanese orthography, phonological awareness HIS STUDY surveys the research on the ing system seems to foster some difficulties T incidence and nature of reading disorders that have not yet been described for alpha- and dyslexia in Japan. Japanese reading dis- betic writing systems. Similar problems may orders may be interesting to an international exist, however, and even may be prevalent, audience because the complex Japanese writ- outside of Japanese if researchers start to look for them. We define dyslexia as problems with decoding written text. We note that the Author Affiliations: Osaka University of Arts, Japan (Dr Tanaka Welty); University of Colorado, broad category of “reading disorders” in- Boulder (Dr Menn); and Tama-Hokubu Medical cludes dyslexia, as well as other difficulties in Center, Japan (Dr Oishi). comprehending written materials, such as dif- The authors have indicated that they have no financial ficulty accessing the mental lexicon and other and no nonfinancial relationships to disclose. problems in getting meaning from text. Read- Corresponding Author: Yumiko Tanaka Welty, PhD, Osaka University of Arts, 4-1-103-1206 Oji-cyo Abeno- ing disorders, in turn, may be considered a ku, Osaka, Japan 545-0023 ([email protected]). subtype of language disorder, and they often DOI: 10.1097/TLD.0000000000000014 co-occur with other language problems. 121 Copyright © 2014 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. 122 TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS/APRIL–JUNE 2014 On the basis of the report of Makita (1968), vantage held by children in Japan decreased Japan was considered free of reading disor- as the number of required kanji increased. By ders, including dyslexia, until the work of the fifth grade, children in America performed Stevenson, Stigler, William Lucker, and Lee just as well as the children in Japan and China. (1982). Makita had reported the prevalence Stevenson et al. concluded that their findings of dyslexia as only 0.98%, which was 10 times offered no support for the claim that dyslexia lower than that in Western countries. This and RD are absent among children in Japan. was based on a questionnaire asking Japanese Large-scale studies of children between first teachers to estimate the number of children and sixth grades that used standardized tests with difficulty reading in their classes. Makita (Shiba & Ishida, 2012; Uno, Wydell, Haruhara, attributed this extremely low rate of dyslexia Kaneko, & Shinya, 2009) reported that the in- to the ease of learning the Japanese orthogra- cidence of dyslexia was 1% based on kana phy by using the kana syllabary, which pro- decoding, but about 3%–7% based on kanji. vides consistent mappings between symbols As Haynes et al. (2000) pointed out after ask- and their pronunciation. For example, is ing classroom teachers for their estimates of always /ka/ and is always /ma/. The kana dyslexia prevalence, it is likely that the preva- syllabary should be easier to learn than the al- lence of RD was affected by the measurement. phabetic system of English, not only because That is, researchers who measured Japanese it is (almost completely) consistent, but also children’s reading skills directly (Hirose & because the name of each kana is the same as Hatta, 1988; Yamada & Banks, 1994) found the sound it represents. In addition, the unit a higher percentage (6%–7%) than the preva- size is probably easier for children to grasp. lence based on the teachers’ reports. That is, the unit is always a consonant-vowel It now appears that there are a few children sequence or a vowel (with the exception of with dyslexia/RD in each classroom and that three “special kana,” including syllable-final the difficulties appear in kanji rather than kana n). Although the kana system is called a syl- learning, but there is disagreement about the labary, the unit of representation is properly mechanisms that might underlie such difficul- called a mora, because some Japanese sylla- ties. Because kanji are more complex in shape bles, like ka+iorda+n, contain two moras than kana, it has been claimed that dyslexia and are written with two kana. is due to visuospatial rather than phonologi- On the contrary, the Japanese orthography cal processing impairments (Uno et al., 2009; contains thousands of kanji. These are non- Wydell & Butterworth, 1999). A related claim phonetic, logographic characters that have is that children who struggle mainly with several pronunciations, which must be memo- kanji may be referred to as having “visual rized and sometimes represent multiple mean- dyslexia” or “decreased visual processing abil- ings depending on whether they are used ities” (Morinaga, Konno, Akimoto, Ogata, & alone or in compound words (see below for Yoda, 1998). fuller explanation). Kanji are introduced grad- On the contrary, phonological involvement ually and start to be used heavily around has been suggested in Japanese reading (see fourth grade. Amano, 1989, for a review; Hara, 1998; Stevenson et al. (1982) compared read- Kobayashi, Haynes, Hook, & Kato, 2005; ing achievement of first- through fifth-grade Oishi, 1998). Mann (1986) examined relation- children in Chinese, Japanese, and English ships between phonological analysis and read- by assessing vocabulary, reading of text, and ing ability of kana among Japanese children comprehension. They found that many chil- and found that mora and phoneme counting dren struggle with reading kanji. Like Makita ability significantly predicted speed and er- (1968), they found that first-grade children in rors in oral reading of kana words. Japanese Japan were better at reading text than first- children with RD typically display decreased grade children in America. However, the ad- phonological awareness (PA) skills (Kato, Copyright © 2014 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. Developmental Reading Disorders in Japan 123 Oishi, Hara, & Kuru, 1998; Morinaga et al., section. Thus, there are several possible symp- 1998; Oishi, 1998). Poor skills in phonologi- tomatologies for dyslexia in Japanese, and cal analysis also have been found using kanji- detailed examination of a number of indi- compound reading tasks in children with vidual cases is needed to understand them. dyslexia in fourth to sixth grades (Shiba & This study attempts to describe what dyslexia Ishida, 2012). The high psycholinguistic de- looks like in a case study of one Japanese child, mands involved in reading kanji compounds and then reports a clinical trial of a reading in- will become apparent in the “How Japanese tervention to further delineate the nature of Orthography Evolved: History and Impact” Japanese dyslexia/RD. section given later. Another explanation for poor reading was JAPANESE ORTHOGRAPHY suggested by Tanaka Welty, Hyodo, Oishi, Wise, and Snyder (2006), who studied PA, decoding skills, and reading comprehension How Japanese orthography evolved: of five Japanese children with RD between History and impact first and fifth grades. They found that all To understand reading difficulties in any five children had