A Short History of Kanji

by Clayton MacKnight

Systems of writing are one of the greatest inventions of human beings. It seems so natural for
us now to read and write that it is hard to imagine a world without this miraculously simple
tool. But, it did have to be invented by somebody. After all, no other species uses writing. It’s
just as dumb humans.

Haven’t you always wondered why in the world Japanese uses three alphabets? I mean there
are simpler ways of doing things to be sure. A short history of Japanese kanji can reveal a lot
about why the Japanese writing system is so complicated. It also good to know why in the
world each kanji have so many darn pronunciations. Couldn’t they just decide on one?

The Early Years of Kanji

Japanese didn’t actually have a native alphabet. Back in the early 5th century AD Japan was
pretty much illiterate. This seems almost hard to comprehend. Just imagine, at about the time
of the fall of Rome, Japan was still illiterate.

According to a few sources, a Chinese scholar named Wani is sometimes credited with
introducing the Chinese writing system to Japan. At first, it was probably used mostly by
bilingual officials in the Japanese court, but it later became more widely used in the court as
Empress Suiko started using it to talk to the hipsters in China.

At this time, Chinese characters were mostly used for Chinese communication, but since the
Japanese thought it was pretty bad-ass to have an alphabet they decided to start using it for
the Japanese language as well. Unfortunately, Chinese and Japanese aren’t related. They have
completely different and incompatible grammar systems. (Japanese is actually more like
Korean in this sense.)

So, a modified version of writing emerged called kanbun. This system used Chinese
characters, but they were marked with small kana like marks to rearrange the sentences
according to the rules of Japanese grammar. In other words, it was kind of a little cheat sheet
that helped Japanese read the Chinese texts.

The Emergence of Kana

This modified version of Chinese characters still didn’t really cut it though. There were still
words in Japanese that needed to be represented that didn’t have a good Chinese equivalent.
A different system of using Chinese characters emerged that use the characters for their
sounds and not their meaning. This system was called Man’yōgana.

The cursive form of these kanji became hiragana. It was first commonly used among women.
It is actually what the Tale of Genji, a famous piece of Japanese literature, was originally
written with. You can see this early form of hiragana on a 2000 yen bill.
Monastery students were the ones that simplified the Man’yōgana into more simplified
forms. They wanted to capture just the essence of the kanji. By doing so, they created
katakana. Katakana is mostly used for loan words (except Chinese words) now as well as for
emphasis and names of some plants and animals.

Similar but Not Related

A lot of people, including myself in the early days, believe that Japanese came from Chinese.
It seems to make sense if you look at the writing of the two languages. They are two major
languages that use a similar alphabet, so one could conclude that they are related.

However, Japanese is not like Chinese at all. They do share an alphabet though. And
Japanese has a lot of loan words from Chinese that came over with the writing system. These
loan words usually came in to describe things that Japanese didn’t used to have very good
words for.

In general, Chinese loan words seem a little more formal than native Japanese words. They
are used more often in written Japanese. However, some writing will use hiragana in place of
some words normally written in kanji if there are too many kanji in the writing. This keeps
the whole piece from getting too stuffy.