Why are some Jinmeiyou kanji missing from JIS 1?

Question

Background

人名用 (Jinmeiyou) kanji are a list of ~800 kanji officially sanctioned by the Japanese government for use in names.

JIS-X-0208 is the major standard for encoding kanji on computers. It's broken into 3 levels, usually called just "JIS 1/2/3"

• JIS 1: ~3000 kanji, which is supposed to include all the Jouyou kanji, Jinmeiyou kanji, and some extras that aren't in either list but are common anyways.
• JIS 2: ~3500 kanji which are rarely used (the Kanji Kentei is based on this)
• JIS 3: Mainly extras from Chinese that are almost never used

My Question

I've found that JIS 1 apparently doesn't include all the Jinmeiyou Kanji. Specifically, these 15 are found in JIS 3(!?)

俠 焰 禱 繡 繫 蠟 醬 顚 鷗 俱 吞 簞 蟬 瘦 錄

Why is that? Are sources such as Jisho and Jitenon wrong about them being Jinmeiyou? Or were they added to the Jinmeiyou list recently?

Cross-posted to Reddit

Answer 1

JIS 0208 is frozen in development, in two versions (with different glyph forms): as JIS X 0208:1997 (the 1990 forms) and as JIS X 0208 (2004 forms). It has basically never revised its contents since 1997, and only once, in 2004, corrected the particular forms of the glyphs in it.

人名用, however, are in constant development. Especially important was the case of 2004, when "484 characters and variant forms of 209 jōyō kanji were added, bringing the total number of the jinmeiyō kanji to 983". Of course, these included many characters that were not incorporated to 0208 years before.

As for the particular characters mentioned:

俠 was JIS 0208:22-02 in 1978, but since the 1982 revisions, its place in 0208 was taken by 侠.

焰 was JIS 0208:17-75 in 1978, but since the 1982 revisions, its place in 0208 was taken by 焔.

禱 was JIS 0208:37-88 in 1978, but since the 1982 revisions, its place in 0208 was taken by 祷.

etc.

I think the pattern in clear: these particular characters represent the reversal of the trend to extended shinjitai. Originally, when 0208 was being compiled in 1978, the characters outside the, back then, Tōyō kanji list were included unsimplified. However, the 1982 revision wholesale replaced parts of characters even outside the list by analogy with tōyō. However, to 2004 the policy was reversed, and now even adding the character to Jōyō is not considered enough reason to simplify. Hence, the newly appended name-allowed characters appeared in jinmeiyō in their unsimplified forms - which were thus not in 0208, from which the unsimplified forms were cut in 1982.

Further reading:

• Lunde, Ken - CJKV Information Processing: Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese Computing - O'Reilly Media (2009)
• Lunde, Ken - Prescriptive Kanji Simplification - PhD Wisconsin-Madison (1995), on the specific matter of 1982 0208 replacements.

Note that the extended shinjitai matter does not explain all of the entries mentioned: for example, 吞 was explicitly added to jinmeiyō without any 0208 precedence. In fact, this character was only added to Adobe-Japan1-4 standard and thus is not even covered by simplest of Japanese fonts.