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According to [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#History), kanji
was introduced and imported from chinese hanzi long time ago before Japanese
language even had a writing system. From there, Japanese kanji has transformed
and evolved from the original hanzi and became what is is today. To my
knowledge, it is not clear how long the process took but I'm guessing that,
except for modification and simplification, the assimilation has already
matured long time ago. Is this true?

**Are there any kanji characters that were recently (i.e. post-[1946
reform](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform)) created or
imported from hanzi?** What I mean are characters that were previously still
not used in Japanese until they were created or imported from hanzi, not
characters that had been assigned new meanings or readings, nor characters
that had been simplified like [惡 ->
悪](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/932/whats-the-difference-
between-and).

Related to that, **is it possible in the future that newly coined words like
むかつく to be assigned brand new kanji characters instead of reusing existing
ones?**
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kanji history
Recent creation or adoption of hanzi characters into Japanese kanji
When the caretaker registers a new born child at a local government, the name
is submitted in handwritten form, and, until recent, that character became
official even if there is a mistake such as missing or extra stroke, etc.
Therefore, every time someone makes a mistake previously not made, that
character was added to the inventory of the kanji used in Japanese. These are
called 俗字 'folk character', 誤字 'wrong character', or 異体字 'character variant'.
In my personal opinion, that is stupid. Recently, [a
law](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/5200%E5%8F%B7%E9%80%9A%E9%81%94) was passed
that restricts usage of such characters.

Besides that, as a game, people sometimes create new kanjis by combining the
existing ones, but those characters almost never come to be used.

It is less likely that a newly created kanji come to be assigned to some word.
For one thing, there are laws and notes by the government that define what is
the right way of writing in kanji. Second, in this digital age, being able to
input and output on the computer has become one criterion for a character to
be used, and is less likely that a newly created character will achive enough
popularity despite not being in the list of characters usable on the computer.
Third, in the recent history of Japan, several political claims/attempts have
been made to discard or lessen the kanji characters, but going in the other
way to add kanji characters is rare.

**Explanation expanded since my intention does not seem to be understood**  
I think it is a general understanding shared by all countries using chinese
characters that chinese characters take too much time to write, or require
extra effort to input on the computers. It is a solid fact that putting East
Asian languages on the computer was delayed because of the difficulty in
handling chinese characters on the computers. First, chinese characters have
much more strokes compared to phonograms like most western languages, so the
display had to become higher in resolution, and still it would take more space
to display them compared to latin alphabet. Second, since the number of
Chinese characters are vast, it could not fit within one-byte character code,
and required modification to the software architecture. Third, since the
number of characters are vast, it cannot be simply mapped to a layout on an
ordinary-sized keyboard; it had to wait for the development of input method
programs for these languages. Each of these was a major obstacle to
computerization of the language. And it is true that this fact worked as a
rationale for considering to dispence Chinese characters in these languages.
But as usual, an attempt to artificially change a language does not succeed
that easily.
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I doubt that any kanji characters commonly used in Japanese were made after
1946.

Some kanji characters used in Japanese are actually made in Japan. They are
called [和製漢字
(わせいかんじ)](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%92%8C%E8%A3%BD%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97)
or 国字 (こくじ). However, although I do not know when they were made, I guess that
most of them were made before 1946.

JIS X 0208 regulates basic characters commonly used in Japanese for
information processing on computers, and the first version was made in 1978
(it was labeled JIS C 6226 at that time). A later investigation by Hiroyuki
Sasahara and other researchers revealed that the specification included
[twelve kanji characters which have no known
origin](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208#.E5.85.B8.E6.8B.A0.E4.B8.8D.E6.98.8E.E3.81.AE.E6.BC.A2.E5.AD.97).
They are sometimes called ghost characters (幽霊文字; ゆうれいもじ). We can say that in
a sense, ghost characters are kanji characters which were created recently
(probably by accident), but they are by no means commonly used.
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