Joyo Secondary (Grade 9) kanji

The "Grade 9" bucket of the Joyo kanji list collects every Joyo character that is not part of the kyoiku (elementary, Grades 1-6) syllabus. These are the kanji introduced across junior high and senior high without specific grade assignments by the Ministry of Education.

The Ministry only specifies which kanji belong to which year for the elementary grades. The remaining 1,130 Joyo characters are taught across the six years of junior and senior high without per-year pinning - schools, textbooks, and study tools each pick their own ordering. The wkstats convention - followed here - is to group all of these as "Grade 9", a label borrowed from kanji study tools that needed a single bucket. These characters cover the specialist vocabulary that a literate Japanese adult is expected to recognise but does not learn at primary school: medical and legal terms, the rarer literary and historical kanji, names of plants and animals, abstract emotional language, and a long tail of characters that appear in fewer than one in a thousand sentences but still show up in newspapers, business documents, and adult fiction. This is the biggest single bucket on the list and the one where coverage gaps in study tools - including WaniKani - actually appear.

WaniKani coverage

WaniKani teaches a substantial chunk of the secondary set by around level 50 and effectively the complete set by level 60. Some specialist characters remain absent, but the practical coverage is wide enough for most native-aimed reading.

To see exactly which of the 1130 Secondary (Grade 9) kanji you have already learned, head to the Joyo coverage tool - it ties your live WaniKani SRS progress to the lists on this site and breaks down coverage by grade.

All 1130 Secondary (Grade 9) kanji