>>282399668
Yes and no, but it's a rather long story that nobody really gives a fuck about.
The gist of it though, do you know kanji? The list of like 2k most used common kanji for basic literacy? Most formal non-fiction publications (read: newspapers, news outlets, and magazines) basically "have" to stay within the boundaries of this list and whenever there's something they have to mention outside of this list they both have to provide a furigana or how to read the word and an explanation of what the term means (which mind you is why MTLing JP news sometimes sounds so redundant, you don't get the point of using the rare raw kanji first then explaining it later in simple terms, you just get the same TL twice).
As far as I know there's no explicit law or contract that forces them to do this, they just do out of reaching the lowest common denominator and keeping shit simple.
For a while both normal novel publications and LN ones stuck to this same standard, and I'm talking about ancient times before shana was even a thing, and in fact a lot of said publishers did open the "light novel" category to publish simpler shit to try grab a slice of the pie that WSJ was starting to grab.
However, because this was just a social contract and not really something set in stone, there was nothing to stop chuuni schizos to write the most overly complex shit imaginable.
This style of writing inevitably then bled down to the rest of the industry.
However fast forward a decade or two and these days there's basically no difference between bunko and light novel, not even illustrations as most of the bunko publishers in the industry do those now too.
And now due to the inevitability of people constantly trying to one-up the other in a cutthroat market the average LN now has far better prose and is harder to read than the average non-fiction "real book", because the latter still stick to joyo kanji standards and avoiding dialects that aren't contemporary formal japanese.
