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Kanji
While kanji are essentially Chinese hanzi used to write Japanese, there are now significant differences between kanji and hanzi, including the use of characters created in Japan, characters that have been given different meanings in Japanese, and post World War II simplifications of the kanji.
Kokuj
Kokuj (国字; literally "national characters") are characters peculiar to Japan. Kokuji are also known as wasei kanji (和製漢字; lit. "Chinese characters made in Japan"). There are hundreds of kokuji (see the sci.lang.japan FAQ: kokuji list). Many are rarely used, but a number have become important additions to the written Japanese language. These include:峠 (とうげ (tōge) mountain pass)
榊 (さかき(sakaki) sakaki tree, genus Cleyera)
畑 (はたけ(hatake) field of crops)
辻 (つじ(tsuji) crossroads, street)
働 (どう(dō), hatara(ku) work)
Some of them like "働" have been introduced to China, though rarely used.
Kokkun
In addition to kokuji, there are kanji that have been given meanings in Japanese different from their original Chinese meanings. These kanji are not considered kokuji but are instead called kokkun (国訓) and include characters such as:沖 oki (offing, offshore; Ch. chōng rinse)
椿 tsubaki (Camellia japonica; Ch. chūn Ailanthus)Old characters and new characters
The same kanji character can sometimes be written in two different ways, 旧字体 (Kyūjitai; lit. "old character style") (舊字體 in Kyūjitai) and 新字体 (Shinjitai; "new character style"). The following are some examples of Kyūjitai followed by the corresponding Shinjitai:國 国 kuni, koku (country)
號 号 gō (number)
變 変 hen, ka(waru) (change)
Kyūjitai were used before the end of World War II, and are mostly, if not completely, the same as the Traditional Chinese characters. After the war the government introduced the simplified Shinjitai in the "Tōyō Kanji Character Form List" (Tōyō Kanji Jitai Hyō, 当用漢字字体表). Some of the new characters are similar to simplified characters used in the People's Republic of China. Also, like the simplification process in China, some of the shinjitai were once abbreviated forms (略字, Ryakuji) used in handwriting, but in contrast with the "proper" unsimplified characters (正字 seiji) were only acceptable in colloquial contexts. This page shows examples of these handwritten abbreviations, identical to their modern Shinjitai forms, from the pre WWII era. There are also handwritten simplifications today that are significantly simpler than their standard forms (either untouched or received only minor simplification in the postwar reforms), examples of which can be seen here [1], but despite their wide usage and popularity, they, like their prewar counterparts, are not considered orthographically correct and are only used in handwriting.Many Chinese characters are not used in Japanese at all. Theoretically, however, any Chinese character can also be a Japanese character—the Daikanwa Jiten, one of the largest dictionaries of kanji ever compiled, has about 50,000 entries, even though most of the entries have never been used in Japanese.
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