The jōyō kanji (常用漢字, Japanese pronunciation: [dʑoːjoːkaꜜɲdʑi] ⓘ, lit.
Due to the requirement that official government documents make use of only jōyō kanji and their readings, several rare characters are also included due to their use in the Constitution of Japan, which was being written at the same time the original 1,850-character tōyō kanji list was compiled.
The differences between the two consisted of 95 additional characters, and the simplification of 燈 as 灯.
The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology instructed teachers to start teaching the new characters in fiscal 2012, so that junior high school students would be able to read them and high school students would be able to write them.
High schools and universities started using the characters in their entrance exams in the 2015 academic year.