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As I understand it, most foreign words in Japanese are written in Katakana.
However, I am curious as to whether in contemporary written Japanese, hacker
is written as a literal adaptation of the western word, or whether a
idiomatically Japanese character/concept is substituted in its place.

For the purposes of this discussion, what I mean by hacker is "Person who
attempts to subvert the security of digital systems" rather than the wider
meaning of the term.

Is this even a concept in contemporary Japanese outside of its status as
foreign word?
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-04-01T18:18:05.033
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2015-04-02T03:28:53.823
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question
kanji
Is there a kanji for "hacker"?
No. There isn't a single kanji nor a compound which means "hacker". Jisho.org
returns no results when searching
[kanji](http://beta.jisho.org/search/hacker%20%23kanji), and only words
containing ハッカー when searching [words](http://beta.jisho.org/search/hacker).
People would just rather write new terms in katakana than to create a new
kanji for them.

However, as blutorange stated, the Chinese word for it is 黒客 (pronounced
hēikè), but of course, that's Chinese and not Japanese.
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2015-04-01T22:14:55.810
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answer
**ハッカー** is widely recognized by the general population in the _narrow_ sense
OP indicated. But if you use this in, say, [Japanese Stack
Overflow](https://ja.stackoverflow.com/), it will soon be corrected. "Hey,
don't use ハッカー in that way! [They're not
criminals](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%8F%E3%83%83%E3%82%AB%E3%83%BC)!"

**クラッカー** specifically refers to the evil ones, and is preferred by IT
professionals.

That said, both ハッカー and クラッカー are still a bit slangy terms in Japanese.
Although newspapers seem to use ハッカー freely recently, official government
documents still avoid using them. For example, [Information-technology
Promotion Agency](http://www.ipa.go.jp/), which is a semi-official
organization, does not use ハッカー/クラッカー, and uses other lengthy replacements
like **攻撃者、侵入者、悪意のある第三者、悪意のある人……** in its [security
guidelines](http://www.ipa.go.jp/security/vuln/websecurity.html).

I don't know why you need a kanji version, but hope this helps.
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2015-04-02T03:28:53.823
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2015-04-02T03:28:53.823
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