Among various characters invented by the human being ,Kanji (Chinese character) is outstanding in its diversity and complexity, in contrast to Roman alphanumerics. So machine recognition of handwritten characters requires particular technics. This paper concerns commercially available optical character readers (OCRs) and the recognition techniques using therein. Methods of character recognition is classified the pattern types and the method of extracting features, to discuss the present states of the character recognition. In regard to the structural analysis, the proposed techniques are classified and discussed in accordance with the extraction method of line segment and axial correlation. Finally, various techniques are compared with one another by using a common database, so as to understand the present states of character recognition and to discuss the technical trends.