Beginnings of Mixed Kanji-Kana Text
Examples of texts written mostly or entirely in kana can be found dating back to about the ninth century, though it should be noted that for many centuries—unlike today—there was considerable variation in the actual shapes. However, while kana script was easy to learn and a practical tool, it lacked the enormous prestige that was associated with the Chinese script and Chinese culture in most periods of pre-modern Japan. Also, there were many Chinese terms borrowed into Japanese, and it tended to be more straightforward to use the corresponding Chinese characters to write them. For reasons such as these, especially for documents of an official nature, the Japanese often wrote not in Japanese using kana (or a combination of characters and kana), but either in Chinese, which of course meant using only Chinese characters and in the way they would be used by native Chinese writers, or—probably more frequently—in an imitation of written Chinese which was influenced to some extent by the differing structure of the Japanese language. For the Japanese, writing in Chinese or attempting to do so was surely a daunting exercise, and so it was no doubt a natural development that at some point texts should appear that had a Chinese ‘look’ but included a small number of kana-like signs, commonly written smaller than the Chinese characters making up most of the text so as to help the reader understand it as Japanese. In broad terms, it was this sort of development that marked the very beginning of what was to evolve as the mixed kanji-kana writing used in Japan today.
The Modern Period
When Japan began actively to adopt various aspects of Western culture and modernize from the latter part of the nineteenth century onwards, some intellectuals expressed feelings of doubt over the very complicated way Japanese was written compared with the marvellous simplicity of the Roman alphabet which allowed any and every thought to be put in writing by means of no more than several dozen letters. Eventually, though, such doubts were set aside, and the Japanese persevered with a hugely intricate writing system which involved not only thousands of characters in their traditional, often very complicated, shapes, but also a very involved historical system of kana spellings. This changed after the end of the Pacific War in 1945, though, when Japanese society experienced many radical changes. Amongst them was script simplification. Starting in 1946, script reforms were carried out, promoting the use of a restricted character set of 1850 and a far simpler system of kana usage based on modern pronunciation.
Broadly speaking, the script reforms put into effect from the late 1940s have been maintained down to the present, though with a degree of easing. For example, the number of general-use characters has been increased, first from 1850 to 1945 (in 1981) and then to 2136 (in 2010). Developments in computer technology from the 1970s onwards have tended to make it easier to write Japanese text using a larger character set, as passive confirmation of characters by the writer by selecting from a list of options on a computer screen is easier than active recall from memory when writing by hand. Computer technology has also greatly assisted the printing of Japanese text, both privately by individuals and commercially.
As should be clear from the above, Chinese characters have been an integral part of Japanese culture for a period of about fifteen hundred years, and their importance is undiminished today. Many characters are used in senses different from in Chinese, and some have been simplified in shape in a way different from the simplified equivalents in PRC Chinese texts. For these reasons, while the Japanese word kanji (漢字) is commonly and validly translated as ‘Chinese characters’, in the context of Japanese it is equally valid to render it instead as ‘Japanese characters’, as in the title to this book.
Note: readers wanting more details are referred to CS2000 (see Bibliography).
Hiragana and Katakana and Their Source Characters
The 214 Determinatives (or ‘Radicals’) System
Note 1: This system was first employed in the Zihui dictionary of 1615 and then adopted as standard in later character dictionaries, replacing the highly innovative but unwieldy system of 540 determinatives known as 部首 (J. bushu, Ch. bushou) used in the Shuowen jiezi (ca.100AD), the earliest extant complete character dictionary compiled in China. The 214 system has been used now for some centuries and continues to be a familiar framework of arrangement for characters in Japan and China, sometimes found with modifications, especially in the People’s Republic of China. The popular character dictionary Xinhua zidian (New Chinese Character Dictionary), published there from 1953 onwards, for example, employs a modified system of 189 determinatives. Below is the full list of the 214 determinatives still widely used in Japanese character dictionaries today. In some instances the English equivalent is just a convenient label, not a translation.
Note 2: While used widely as a system of arrangement in character dictionaries, the traditional system of 214 determinatives is not the main referencing system used in this book, in which the numbers for characters and character elements relate to the individual entries. For details, see Introduction (Section 7.6).
Note 3: Cross-reference numbers under ‘Alternative forms/nicknames/comments’ below relate only to the numbered determinatives in the list below, not to entry numbers in the main part of this book.
| No. | English | Alternative forms/nickname/comments | |
| 1 | 一 | one | |
| 2 | 丨 | rod | |
| 3 | 丶 | dot | |
| 4 | 丿 | ‘kana no’ | |
| 5 | 乙 | fishhook | 乚 |
| 6 | 亅 | barb | |
| 7 | 二 | two | |
| 8 | 亠 | lid | |
| 9 | 人 | person | |
| 10 | 儿 | person variant | nickname: bent legs |
| 11 | 入 | entering | |
| 12 | 八 | eight, split, separate | |
| 13 | 冂 | box cover | |
| 14 | 冖 | a cover | |
| 15 | 冫 | ice | |
| 16 | 几 | table enclosure | |
| 17 | 凵 | open box | |
| 18 | 刀 | knife, sword | 刂 |
| 19 | 力 | strength | |
| 20 | 勹 | wrapping enclosure | |
| 21 | 匕 | ladle | CO 匕 is separate graph element |
| 22 | 匚 | box on side | |
| 23 | 匸 | box projects out | |
| 24 | 十 | cross | |
| 25 | 卜 | divination | |
| 26 | 卩 | kneeling person | |
| 27 | 厂 | cliff | |
| 28 | 厶 | self, ‘kana mu’ | |
| 29 | 又 | (right) hand | |
| 30 | 口 | mouth | |
| 31 | 囗 | ‘country’ enclosure | |
| 32 | 土 | earth | |
| 33 | 士 | warrior | |
| 34 | 夂 | descending foot | nickname: crossed legs |
| 35 | 夊 | walk slowly/drag foot | |
| 36 | 夕 | evening | |
| 37 | 大 | big | |
| 38 | 女 | woman | |
| 39 | 子 | child | |
| 40 | 宀 | roof | |
| 41 | 寸 | 3-stroke hand | |
| 42 | 小 | small | |
| 43 | 尢 | crooked leg | |
| 44 | 尸 | corpse/lying figure | |
| 45 | 屮 | single plant | |
| 46 | 山 | mountain | |
| 47 | 川 | river | |
| 48 | 工 | carpenter’s
|
