system and the common class of people didn’t have the education needed to read the thousand of characters.
At first, they adopted of a very small set of Chinese kanji whose sounds could be used to express the spoken Japanese language. A collection of popular Japanese poems was rendered in these characters which resulted in their widespread acceptance and use.
This set, eventually called manyogana, generally had their Chinese meaning ignored and were used to represent the sounds of Japanese only. Simplification of the characters resulted in two writing styles, hiragana and katakana.
Scholars, considering kana to be inferior, continued to work on devising methods to read “kanbun”, or Chinese literature, using rules to alter the word order and pronouncing the words using Japanese sounds. This resulted the adoption of many new Chinese words and concepts, and also, the sounds of onyomi pronunciation. But to adopt kanji in a way that would result in true Japanese kanji, the characters had to be paired with preexisting Japanese words based on their meaning. And this linked the kunyomi sounds to kanji pronunciation. Both of these methods will be discussed later in the book.
Meanwhile, kana had been on its way to becoming the mainstream writing system of the common people, and by the eighth century, it was in widespread use.
Eventually, all three of these scripts settled into the specific roles they play in the Japanese writing system of today.
STYLES OF KANJI
There are six main styles of written kanji and each has its own characteristic appearance and historic usage. Of these, only three pertain to modern Japanese calligraphy.
Kaisho
Kaisho is a plain style that is the easiest to read. It is also used by those first learning to write kanji. Its simplicity allows students to clearly see all of the brush strokes of each character. Kaisho is the style that is the closest to the modern printed fonts of today, and is the style taught in this book.
Gyousho
Gyousho is a semi-cursive style that is akin to the English cursive handwriting that people use after they become proficient at writing the characters. It sometimes blends strokes into a cluster and may slightly simplify some complex structures.
Sousho
Sousho, or “grass script”, is a fully cursive style of writing that uses flowing lines to merge many of the brush strokes together. Even though some of the characters are recognizable to the average reader, most people cannot accurately read sousho script because so many of the characters are modified to the extent that the resemblance is not always apparent.
Naturally, all of the major styles originated in China, and some are still used for purposes other than calligraphy in Japan today.
Such a style is the seal script, or “reisho”, which was originally used on the name stamps of calligraphers and craftsmen. Red or orange name stamps are still used today as an official signature for individuals and companies on legal documents, but only the biggest companies use the reisho style.
THE MODERN JAPANESE LANGUAGE
OVERVIEW OF THE JAPANESE WRITING SYSTEM
The modern Japanese language, especially, the writing system, is very complicated compared to English and most other western languages.
First of all, it uses a total of five different types of writing scripts: kanji, hiragana, katakana, Roman letters, and Arabic numerals.
Kanji Characters
Though the majority of kanji (漢字) characters are of Chinese origin, some were created in Japan, while others have been simplified for use in Japan. Generally speaking, we can treat all kanji alike regardless of their origin.
Though over 60,000 kanji characters are known to exist, most of these are obsolete Chinese characters. Modern Japanese uses between 2,000 and 3,000 kanji. Currently, the public schools teach the “Jouyou Kanji” (常用漢字) which is a list of 1,945 characters often encountered in daily life in Japan.
Kanji is typically used for Japanese words and words of Chinese origin.
The Roman Letter Alphabet (Romaji)
“Romaji” (ローマ字) refers to characters that originated in Rome, or what we call the Roman letter alphabet. The Roman letter alphabet was first introduced to Japanese during the sixteenth century and was used to preach sermons in Japanese by foreign missionaries who couldn’t read kanji or kana. This is its main usage.
In Japan, even though many English and European words are written in their native Roman letter script, its main purpose is to provide a method for those who cannot read Japanese kanji or kana to read Japanese words with Roman letters.
Arabic Numerals (Sanyou suuji)
The Arabic numerals (算用数字) such as 1, 2, 3, etc. were adopted in Japan about the same time as Roman letters. The name “sanyou suuji” means ‘numerals for calculation’, so as you can guess, mathematics, financial documents, price lists, and the like, are normally written in Arabic numerals.
The Japanese numbering system using kanji is normally only used for smaller numbers, likes a person’s age, or prices in a menu.
Hiragana
Hiragana (平仮名) is one of the two phonetic alphabets used to write purely Japanese words. It is also used to write what is called okurigana, when the root portion of a word is written in kanji and the second half, which includes the tense and mood, is written in kana.
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