Calligraphy

In Japanese, calligraphy is called shodou, or “the way of writing”. All Japanese children have to learn the basics of calligraphy as part of their elementary school education.

The history of Japanese calligraphy can be traced back to the origins of Chinese civilization, where the master Wang Xizhi is credited with the creation of the art, about 4,500 years ago. Shodou as well as Chinese system of writing, kanji, was first introduced into Japan in the 8th century. By the time, Chinese calligraphy had already been developed a considerable amount.

By the early Heian period, the Japanese had already begun to show considerable attainment in the new art form with the “Three Great Brushes” (or sanpitsu) of the Buddhist monk, Kuukai (774-835), the Emperor Saga (786-842) and the courtier Tachibana no Hayanari (778-842) achieving an apotheosis of the then-popular calligraphic style of the T’ang Chinese master, Yan Zhenqing (709-785). Their calligraphy is considered a true representation of Chinese calligraphy’s timeless beauty.

In the 10th and 11th centuries, these three were succeeded by the Sanseki (Three Traces) of Ono no Toufuu, Fujiwara no Sukemasa (also known as Fujiwara no Sai), and Fujiwara no Yukinari (also known as Fujiwara no Kozei). These three masters developed what would become the first uniquely Japanese calligraphy style, wayou (also joudaiyou). Fujiwara no Yukinari’s style led to the creation of the Sesonji School, and Ono no Toufuu served as an archetype for the Shouren’in school which later became the Oie style of calligraphy. The Oie style was used for official documents in the Edo period and was the prevailing style taught in the terakoya schools of that time.

From its roots in ancient Chinese civilization, Japanese calligraphy has continued to grow and develop in style and form with zen-ei sho (an avant-garde postwar calligraphy style) representing just the latest stage in this evolution.

Handwriting

Japanese is related to Japonic language of the Ural-Altaic family of languages, which includes Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu and Korean language.

Early form of Japanese existed from about the 3rd century AD. The writing system the Japanese began to use was Chinese, imported from China and Korea along with a variety of technologies, political systems and Buddhism. This remains in the form of kanji symbols.

There are two phonetic “alphabets” of simplified Japanese symbols, named the Katakana and Hiragana. They were developed to cater to the sounds of the polysyllabic Japanese language pronunciations as it is difficult to adapt Chinese kanji symbols to do so since Chinese script is monosyllabic.

Kanji Characters

Kanji, imported from Chinese characters, is used alongside with hiragana and katakana symbols in written Japanese.

There are about 50,000 kanji characters in existence. A literate Japanese adult will be able to recognize about 3,500. Out of these, only 1,945 are officially recognized as daily or jouyou kanji, and knowledge of about 1,000 kanji symbols is considered sufficient to read about 90% of the words in a Japanese newspaper.

Hiragana Symbols

It is simple, rounded Japanese symbols. There are 46 hiragana symbols in Japanese, each with a particular sound but with no independent meaning.

The first step in the development of hiragana was near the beginning of the Heian Period (794-1192) when man’yōgana (kanji characters which are used to indicate pronunciation rather than meaning) was introduced. Hiragana characters evolved from this simplified cursive form of man’yōgana and also conveyed sound rather than meaning.

When hiragana was first created, it was not accepted by everyone as many felt that the educated language was still Chinese. Historically, the regular script (kaisho) form of the characters was used by men and called otokode (men’s writing), while the cursive script (sōsho) form of the kanji was used by women. Thus hiragana was often used by women, who were not allowed access to the same levels of education as men. From this comes the alternative name of onnade (women’s writing).

Interestingly, this development resulted in the explosion of written expression among Japanese women that reached its zenith with Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji) by Lady Murasaki

Katakana Symbols

It is a simplified Japanese symbols derived from Kanji but compare to its Hiragana counterpart, it is more angular.

Katakana symbols were developed in the 9th Century by Japanese students of Buddhism who found it hard to keep up when writing lecture notes using complex Chinese kanji symbols. They started to write only parts of the more complex kanji symbols as shorthand that then became established as katakana. The word katakana itself means “fragmentary kana“, as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji.

Up until a series of orthographic reforms immediately following World War II, katakana was used for okurigana in official documents, and frequently in other contexts

Rōmaji Characters

Rōmaji (”Roman characters”), sometimes misspelled as Rōmanji, is the romanisation of Japanese kanji or kana words in Latin alphabet. Rōmaji are often used in Japanese text for abbreviations, metric measurements, and to clarify the spelling of foreign names.

The earliest Japanese romanisation system was developed based on the Portuguese language, around 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Yajiro. Jesuit presses used this system in their printed Catholic books for missionaries to preach their converts without learning Japanese language. In general, the early Portuguese system was similar to Nihon-shiki in its treatment of vowels. Some consonants were transliterated differently, for instance, the ‘k’ was rendered as ‘c’ and the ‘h’ as ‘f’ so Nihon no kotoba (The language of Japan) was spelled as Nifon no cotoba.

When Christians were expulsed from Japan in the early 1600s, rōmaji fell out of use, and were only used sporadically in foreign texts until the mid-1800s when Japan opened up again. The systems used today all developed in the latter half of the 19th century.

In the Meiji era, some Japanese scholars advocated abolishing the Japanese writing system entirely and using rōmaji in its stead. Several Japanese texts were published entirely in rōmaji during this period, but failed to catch on because of the large number of homonyms in Japanese, which are pronounced similarly but written in different characters. Later, in the early 20th century, some scholars devised syllabary systems with characters derived from Latin: these were even less popular because they were not based on any historical use of the Latin alphabet.

Today, rōmaji is used for many reasons; street signs for foreigners, transcription of names used in another language, dictionaries and textbooks for beginners, or typographic emphasis.

There are a number of different romanisation systems in use, which the three main ones are Hepburn, Kunrei-shiki, and Nihon-shiki. Hepburn (long-vowel omitted) is the most widely used. Modified Hepburn, which uses a macron to indicate some long vowels and an apostrophe to note the separation of easily confused syllables (for example, the name じゅんいちろう is written with the syllables jun-ichi-ro and u, and is romanised as Jun’ichirō in Modified Hepburn) is widely used in Japan and among foreign academics.