I can't see this becoming a problem any time soon, not in Japan's highly literate culture. Every time I ride a subway, half the commuters, youth and adults alike, have manga or a novel in their hands. I go to Starbucks to study, and I'm surrounded by people doing homework by hand, writing letters by hand, or filling out their journals by hand. The manual for the Kanji Kentei game (which I have) has a chart boasting the increasing numbers of people taking the kanji test each year.

I'm sure it's true that people can't necessarily write from memory every character they know, but surely the situation is much better than it was 50 years ago, and kanji didn't disappear then either.

Thankfully, semi-obscure musical references are in no danger of dying off in the next decade.

Matt, it's not like you to set up straw men, so I'm a little puzzled where you're getting the reference to an assertion of people's ability to write kanji going "down to zero ... within five years to a decade." The only quote I see in the Language Log post that sounds anything like that is from Mair, who states: "The rapidity of character attrition is going to intensify within the next 5-10 years, so swiftly that people -- depending on their outlook -- will be astonished, dismayed, or overjoyed." That, however, is very different than asserting that people in Japan are going to completely lose the ability to write in kanji within a decade. Or is there something I've overlooked, perhaps in one of the Japanese articles?

Noting that many adults are reading comic books might not really be the best evidence of Japan having a "highly literate culture."

I mean no disparagement of manga.

As Unger notes, "How many Americans would willingly count comic books -- even the sort aimed at adult readers -- in an assessment of literacy in the United States?"

(Oops. That was me again above. I didn't mean to post that anonymously.)

I was thinking more of Prof. Mair's "It's bound to happen, both with KANJI (Japanese) and with HANZI (Chinese), as it already essentially has with HANJA (Korean)." Although it isn't clear what "it" is, I assumed that the reference to Korean meant that "it" was "kanji more or less disappearing from newly produced texts, except in certain specialised contexts", and I interpreted the "5-10 years" remark afterward as an attempt to set a rough time frame for when this might happen. If this is not what he meant, then I offer my sincere apologies.

As for comic books... I personally started reading them when I was only semi-literate in Japanese, but doing so helped me improve, to the point where I was ready to read a novel (with a dictionary, of course). So they are a complex case. Certainly "able to read a comic book" is a dubious way to define "literate", but they do have their own special place in the librosystem, for want of a better word.

(Example: the presence of visual cues like facial expressions and posture mean that conversations between comic book characters are often written in a more oblique or cryptic way than they would be in, say, a novel. So while it may be easier and faster to decode the actual printed sentences in a comic book, it may also require a subtly different set of comprehension skills to figure out what the words mean in the context of the story. Whether you think those skills are a subset of, related to, or entirely irrelevant to "literacy" is a different matter... In any case it certainly has little to do with the really pressing issues, like "what proportion of adults suffer because they cannot read things necessary or useful in their day-to-day lives?")

The only reason I can read some academic books in Korean is the presence of hanja. So, to nil?

OK, OK, I edited the relevant section to more closely reflect the vagueness of the anti-kanji claims. I think my overall point stands.