First off I should mention that I red and am reviewing the 1984 edition of this book. No I didn’t find this at some used book store. Instead this book is a bit more of an heirloom. You see I am not the first one in my family to learn Japanese, both my Grandmother and Grandfather on my mother’s side learned a bit of it. This book was given to my grandfather for his birthday by one Mr. Suzuki, a retired engineer who for a period of time moved to my mother’s hometown in rural Alberta and taught Japanese as well as becoming friends with my grandfather.
At first I was a bit optimistic and expected something akin to Dr. Heisig’s work Remember the Kanji(RTK). While Len Walsh gets close his primary focus is on the character’s origin and how it was simplified from that, this is in contrast to RTK where primitive elements are the focus. Also unlike RTK, Read Japanese Today includes the readings. Since I have no intention to learn readings piece-meal I for the most part ignored them, had I not I see no way that someone would be able, as the book’s back claims, learn or even get through the book in “just a few hours” if they were to attempt to memorize ~500 random readings. Read Japanese Today appears to be trying to cover a bit of everything, including surnames. Quite a few surnames are included along with other words in a word list that comes ever so often after a new Kanji has been introduced.
One thing I did enjoy was the history provided, for instance Mr. Walsh mentions how some Kanji are undergoing a change at the time of printing, for instance ward(区) used to use the Kanji for goods(品) were as the modern version has a cross inside. In general he also gives other interesting facts such as why so many Japanese female names need in ko(子) or why ocean(洋) has a sheep in it.
I would actually not recommend this book to anyone seriously studying Japanese since there are so much better ways to learn what is covered in this book, ergo RTK+Sentences. With that said the student of Japanese is not really the target for this book, this piece of marketing reviles the truth well enough: “Make your stay in Japan more than just a superficial tour—READ JAPANESE TODAY!”(Source: Back of Read Japanese Today). With that in mind this book does what it was meant to, give the average tourist some basic knowledge of Japanese, an admirable goal. It may also find use as a tool to inform say a family member who is taking issue with your study or who just would like to know a bit more. One friend of our family has a son who is also planing to study Japanese and took note of this book after seeing it, the trivia aspect of it was her primary interest.