On the replacing of kanji obsoleted in the 1946 reforms with similar-looking kanji.

Question

This is my understanding but please correct me if some of my details are wrong:

• In 1946 the Japanese language underwent a reform and standardization process
• A subset of kanji (about 1850) were made official and others more or less obsoleted
• A smaller subset of kanji were simplified, the new forms becoming known as shinjitai and the previous forms as kyujitai

But some words which used characters made obsolete were respelled with similar looking characters, my favourite being:

"濠洲" (ごうしゅう, Gōshū), an ateji for "Australia" became "豪州"

• Does this replacement of characters have a name? They are not shinjitai since they already existed and they are not in shinjitai tables.
• Does this only happen with ateji or also with regular words?
• Does it only happen when the replacement characters have a same reading as the replaced characters?
• If not, does this add to the confusion of which readings apply to which characters?

Answer 1

I do not know any name for rewriting of kanji (because of a kanji reform) using a similar-looking kanji.

I am not sure if 濠洲 was replaced by 豪州 because they look similar. I guess that the biggest factor that contributed to this rewriting was they can be read in the same way. Because 濠洲 is ateji, the most important property of the kanji 濠 must be its pronunciation. But these two facts (濠 and 豪 looking similar and 濠 and 豪 pronounced identically) are related because the kanji 濠 is 形声文字 (けいせいもじ; a kanji character consisting of a part representing its meaning and a part representing its pronunciation).

Also note that in many other words, a kanji was rewritten with another kanji with the same pronunciation and different meaning and shape (although meanings are often related in some way). In 1956, 文部省国語審議会 (the Council on National Language (?) of the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture) published an official report describing guidelines for rewriting the kanji which are not tōyō kanji (the kanji included in the 1946 list). The report was entitled “同音の漢字による書きかえ” (どうおんのかんじによるかきかえ; Rewriting by Kanji with the Same Pronunciation), and it included many such examples (see an article in the Japanese Wikipedia). This also suggests that the pronunciation was a bigger factor than the shape when choosing how to rewrite kanji.