I can struggle my way through printed Japanese — thanks to Google lens, looking up kanji is no longer the chore it was with my well thumbed Nelson — but there are Meiji era prints with informal handwritten text, where I typically can only make out a few of the kanji. Many times, Japanese will skip over elements in handwriting, leaving an inexperienced reader struggling to figure out “which character is this?”.
Is there a resource for learning to read handwritten Japanese – as opposed to more calligraphic and formal stylings?
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I am ashamed this post is so long. Feel free to ignore.
I’ll try my hand at answering your question. I’m a doctoral student in Japanese political history, and for my research I have to read lots of primary materials in handwritten Japanese (both written with pen and with a brush), from the period 1905 – 1931 (so late Meiji, the Taishô Period, and very early Shôwa period). I speak Japanese pretty well (somewhere around a C1 level, if I have to guess), and I’ve been taking classes, as well as holding study group sessions to learn how to read such characters for about 4 years about now. It is supremely hard.
Let me first start by addressing whether there are resources that would allow someone who has an beginner to intermediate level of Japanese to read handwritten materials (I say this because you say you also struggle to get through regular printed Japanese – which is in no way meant to be a dig at you, by the way). To the best of my knowledge, no such resource exists. There are quite a few people working on this problem, who hope to solve it via AI. It’s possible that in 5 or 10 years there will be resources available that with a great degree of accuracy can read and interpret handwritten characters in all manner of contexts, but we are not there yet, as far as I know. I would love to be wrong about this — it would truly be a life-saver in my research, so if anyone has an inside line on some amazing app or web application that does this, I would sincerely like to know.
If you feel like this gives you all the information you want, please stop reading here. Below I will give more details about what you can do if you really want to learn to read such handwritten characters well in the long-term.
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First of all, it’s important to think about which types of handwritten characters you are actually looking to read. Just like the stereotypical doctor’s note, handwritten notes written by Japanese people hanging on fridges right now might also be tough to read (it took me multiple years to learn to easily read the handwriting of one of my friends). However, aside from the idea that some people just have bad handwriting and thus will forever write sentences that are hard to read (myself among them), you can get used to comtemporary handwriting through straightforward practice, because the patterns of the language used line up with the modern Japanese that you yourself are studying.
Moving on to the ‘real deal’ then: the time period does make a difference. For instance, in general it is said that the further back in time you go, the ‘easier’ handwritten characters (called 崩し字 or ‘destroyed characters’) become to read, because before the second half of the Meiji period education (and thus the ability to write) was rare, and thus those who could write (and had the time to do it) tended to abide more strictly by the ‘rules’ by which calligraphy abides. There are, after all, logics which dictate how a specific radical or part of a character should correctly be abbreviated. As we go into the Taishô period, however, you have a ton of people writing who received an education in the by now generalized education system of Japan, but who for efficiency’s sake (and other reasons) broke these rules far more often. For that reason, despite the fact they are further removed in time, characters from earlier time periods can sometimes be easier to read – assuming you know how to read kuzushiji to begin with. However, here as well there is of course no true uniformity, if only because depending on the calligraphy school the characters can sort of be on a gradient between 行書 and 草書 scripts (the latter being the truly flowing script, in which separate characters may also be written in a connected way.)
I said all of the above, because I have noticed that the Miwo app I list below, which in theory is the most promising resource for you, is absolutely useless to someone like me, who often has to read handwritten, ugly handwriting from the 1920s. I have colleagues who study Meiji-period texts and say that these resources actually work better for them, because the form of the handwriting is closer to the ideal grass script form that calligraphers would have taught (and that contemporary calligraphers still do in Asia.) So, I suppose your mileage may vary. However, the crux of my explanation still holds true: there is no resource that allows you to go from not being able to read kuzushiji at all, to all of a sudden having a dictionary or an app spell out the solution for you. In order to effectively puzzle out handwritten texts, you need to develop an extensive knowledge of kanji, of contemporary Japanese grammar, of older Japanese (not Kanbun, thankfully, in your case, but regardless still classical Japanese), and the ability to bring these together and to ‘predict’ what characters or phrases might come up in the sentence based on what has come before. When we read handwritten English, let’s say, we automatically can predict what the sentence will be to some degree, and this allows our brains to skim over otherwise nearly illegible text. The same routine has to instill itself in you for Japanese. It goes without saying this requires bringing together a lot of linguistic elements, and having significant mastery over them.