[Chathamization]

> Their use is similar to radicals in Mandarin, which is to provide additional semantic clarification.

Radicals are used in the same way for Hanzi (Chinese/"Mandarin") and Kanji (Japanese). Most of the Japanese characters are the same as the unsimplified Chinese characters. Furigana is used in a fairly different way, though. You occasionally see phonetic writing similar to furigana underneath characters in books that are used to teach children how to read. But it’s not nearly as common as in Japan, and it’s only (from what I’ve seen) used as a study aid for kids, not in the more creative ways the author discusses here.

The big difference as well is that the phonetic writing in Chinese isn’t part of the language itself. It’s like IPA (the dictionary pronunciation symbols) - they’re used to tell you how to write something, not to actually communicate. Kana (which furigana is written in), is actually part of the Japanese language.

[adrian_b]

Furigana are frequent in many technical and scientific texts, not only in children books, because such texts may include many words that would not be used in normal conversations.

This was already true for the books published before WWII, i.e. before the writing reform, even if those books contained much less hiragana than the modern texts (after the writing reform a lot of hiragana word terminations began to be written in order to disambiguate the readings of kanji for which native Japanese readings are chosen, even when the complete furigana are not provided; this post-WWII writing style may reduce the need for furigana).