Japanese Writing

"CHINESE, PLUS"

Like other countries on Asia's outer edge, Japan was influenced by China. The Chinese writing system was relayed to Japan by Korea in the fourth century A.D.

Calligraphy is as important to the Japanese as to the Chinese. The most admired, for both official and everyday use, is the hard-to-read grass style.

As with Chinese, Japanese is read from top to bottom, beginning on the right, or horizontally, from left to right.

Though Chinese culture and masses of Chinese words and characters were assimilated by the Japanese, it was some time before Japanese could be written, for Chinese writing was not easily adaptable to Japanese, a languge of an entirely different kind.

Only in the matter of word roots was it similar, for example: means "mountain" (pronounced shan in Chinese and yama in Japanese);

means "flower" (hua in Chinese and hana in Japanese).

However, Japanese could not function without its many grammatical parts, for which there were no Chinese characters. Something had to be added to Chinese characters in order to write Japanese.

The Japanese developed a system which uses unmodified Chinese characters, chosen for their Chinese meanings, called kanji, to write Japanese word roots; and abbreviated Chinese characters, chosen for their Chinese sounds, called kana, to write everything else. The two are normally used together.

Kana consists of two different sets of 50 characters each. Since each kana character represents a syllable of speech rather than a single sound, the two sets are called syllabaries, not alphabets. These two syllabaries are called hiragana and katakana.

Hiragana characters are simplified forms of cursive Chinese characters, used to write such parts of Japanese as suffixes and prepositions. Katakana characters are simplified forms of standard Chinese characters used mainly to write borrowed Western words.

Although their spoken language has only 112 different syllables (English has about 3000), theirs is the most complex of today's major writing systems.

The Traditional Inventor of Hiragana

Kukai, or Kobo Daishi, a Buddhist abbot (774-835), is thought to have played a major role in standardizing hiragana. The process continued until the late nineteenth century.

The first writers of Japanese had used whole Chinese characters for meaning and sound with no indication of which way it was to be read.

Standardization of hiragana entailed (1) analyzing Japanese speech to determine what the syllables were; (2) choosing from among the many possibilities one Chinese character to represent each syllable of spoken Japanese; (3) modifying these characters so that a reader could distinguish them from kanji at a glance.

Kukai wanted all people to learn to read and write. He started a school for commoners' children. Though it was not continued after his death, the value of literacy had become an entrenched idea, and today the Japanese are among the best educated and literate people in the world.

Ladies of Letters

Women of the Japanese aristoracy in the ninth to eleventh centuries A.D. were among the first to benefit from hiragana, the Japanese syllabary. It enabled them to produce some fine literature, including the world's first great novel, Tale of Genji, by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Meanwhile, the men continued to struggle with Chinese characters, considered too difficult for women.