This article is about the modern writing system and its history. For an overview of the entire language, seeJapanese language. For the use of Latin letters to write Japanese, seeRomanization of Japanese.
Japanese novel usingkanji kana majiri bun (text with bothkanji andkana), the most generalorthography for modern Japanese.Ruby characters (orfurigana) are also used to transcribe kanji words (in modern publications these would generally be omitted for well-known kanji). The text is in the traditionaltategaki ("vertical writing") style; it is read down the columns and from right to left, like traditional Chinese. Published in 1908.
The modernJapanese writing system uses a combination oflogographickanji, which are adoptedChinese characters, andsyllabickana. Kana itself consists of a pair ofsyllabaries:hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; andkatakana, used primarily for foreign words and names,loanwords,onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.[1][2][3]
Several thousand kanji characters are in regular use, which mostly originate from traditional Chinese characters. Others made inJapan are referred to as "Japanese kanji" (和製漢字,wasei kanji), also known as "[our] country's kanji" (国字,kokuji). Each character has an intrinsic meaning (or range of meanings), and most have more than one pronunciation, the choice of which depends on context. Japanese primary and secondary school students are required to learn 2,136jōyō kanji as of 2010.[4] The total number of kanji is well over 50,000, though this includes tens of thousands of characters only present in historical writings and never used in modern Japanese.
In modern Japanese, the hiragana and katakana syllabaries each contain 46 basic characters, or 71 includingdiacritics. With one or two minor exceptions, each different sound in the Japanese language (that is, each different syllable, strictly eachmora) corresponds to one character in each syllabary. Unlike kanji, these characters intrinsically represent sounds only; they convey meaning only as part of words. Hiragana and katakana characters also originally derive from Chinese characters, but they have been simplified and modified to such an extent that their origins are no longer visually obvious.
Texts without kanji are rare; most are either children's books—since children tend to know few kanji at an early age—or early electronics such as computers, phones, and video games, which could not display complexgraphemes like kanji due to both graphical and computational limitations.
To a lesser extent, modern written Japanese also uses initialisms from theLatin alphabet, for example in terms such as "BC/AD", "a.m./p.m.", "FBI", and "CD".Romanized Japanese is most frequently used by foreign students of Japanese who have not yet mastered kana, and by native speakers forcomputer input.
It is known from archaeological evidence that the first contacts that the Japanese had with Chinese writing took place in the 1st century AD, during the lateYayoi period. However, the Japanese people of that era probably had little to no comprehension of the script, and they would remain relatively illiterate until the 5th century AD in theKofun period, when writing in Japan became more widespread.
Kanji characters are used to write mostcontent words of native Japanese or (historically) Chinese origin, which include the following:
manynouns, such as川 (kawa, "river") and学校 (gakkō, "school")
the stems of mostverbs andadjectives, such as見 in見る (miru, "see") and白 in白い (shiroi, "white")
the stems of manyadverbs, such as速 in速く (hayaku, "quickly") and上手 as in上手に (jōzu ni, "masterfully")
mostJapanese personal names and place names, such as田中 (Tanaka) and東京 (Tōkyō). (Certain names may be written in hiragana or katakana, or some combination of these, plus kanji.)
Some Japanese words are written with different kanji depending on the specific usage of the word—for instance, the wordnaosu (to fix, or to cure) is written治す when it refers to curing a person, and直す when it refers to fixing an object.
Most kanji have more than one possible pronunciation (or "reading"), and some common kanji have many. These are broadly divided intoon'yomi, which are readings that approximate to a Chinese pronunciation of the character at the time it was adopted into Japanese, andkun'yomi, which are pronunciations of native Japanese words that correspond to the meaning of the kanji character. However, some kanji terms have pronunciations that correspond to neither theon'yomi nor thekun'yomi readings of the individual kanji within the term, such as明日 (ashita, "tomorrow") and大人 (otona, "adult").
Unusual or nonstandard kanji readings may be glossed usingfurigana. Kanji compounds are sometimes given arbitrary readings for stylistic purposes. For example, inNatsume Sōseki's short storyThe Fifth Night, the author uses接続って fortsunagatte, thegerundive-te form of the verbtsunagaru ("to connect"), which would usually be written as繋がって orつながって. The word接続, meaning "connection", is normally pronouncedsetsuzoku.
Hiragana (平仮名) emerged as a manual simplification via cursive script of the most phonetically widespread kanji among those who could read and write during theHeian period (794–1185). The main creators of the current hiragana were ladies of theJapanese imperial court, who used the script in the writing of personal communications and literature.
Hiragana is used to write the following:
okurigana (送り仮名)—inflectional endings foradjectives andverbs—such asる in見る (miru, "see") andい in白い (shiroi, "white"), and respectivelyた andかった in their past tense inflections見た (mita, "saw") and白かった (shirokatta, "was white").
joshi (助詞)—small, usually common words that, for example, mark sentence topics, subjects and objects or have a purpose similar to English prepositions such as "in", "to", "from", "by" and "for".
miscellaneous other words of various grammatical types that lack a kanji rendition, or whose kanji is obscure, difficult to typeset, or considered too difficult to understand for the context (such as in children's books).
furigana (振り仮名)—phonetic renderings of hiragana placed above or beside the kanji character. Furigana may aid children or non-native speakers or clarify nonstandard, rare, or ambiguous readings, especially for words that use kanji not part of thejōyō kanji list.
There is also some flexibility for words with common kanji renditions to be instead written in hiragana, depending on the individual author's preference (all Japanese wordscan be spelled out entirely in hiragana or katakana, even when they are normally written using kanji). Some words are colloquially written in hiragana and writing them in kanji might give them a more formal tone, while hiragana may impart a softer or more emotional feeling.[5] For example, the Japanese wordkawaii, the Japanese equivalent of "cute", can be written entirely in hiragana as inかわいい, or with kanji as可愛い.
Some lexical items that are normally written using kanji have becomegrammaticalized in certain contexts, where they are instead written in hiragana. For example, the root of the verb見る (miru, "see") is normally written with the kanji見 for themi portion. However, when used as a supplementary verb as in試してみる (tameshite miru) meaning "to try out", the whole verb is typically written in hiragana asみる, as we see also in食べてみる (tabete miru, "try to eat [it] and see").
Katakana (片仮名) emerged around the 9th century, in theHeian period, when Buddhist monks created a syllabary derived from Chinese characters to simplify their reading, using portions of the characters as a kind of shorthand. The origin of the alphabet is attributed to the monkKūkai.
Katakana is used to write the following:
transliteration of foreign words and names, such asコンピュータ (konpyūta, "computer") andロンドン (Rondon, "London"). However, some foreign borrowings that were naturalized may be rendered in hiragana, such as たばこ (tabako, "tobacco"), which comes from Portuguese. See alsoTranscription into Japanese.
commonly used names of animals and plants, such asトカゲ (tokage, "lizard"),ネコ (neko, "cat") andバラ (bara, "rose"), and certain other technical and scientific terms, including chemical and mineral names such asカリウム (kariumu, "potassium"),ポリマー (porimā, "polymer") andベリル (beriru, "beryl").
occasionally, the names of miscellaneous other objects whose kanji are rare, such asローソク (rōsoku, "candle"); the kanji form,蝋燭, contains thehyōgaiji蝋.
The first contact of the Japanese with the Latin alphabet occurred in the 16th century, during theMuromachi period, when they had contact with Portuguese navigators, the first European people to visit the Japanese islands. The earliest Japanese romanization system was based onPortuguese orthography. It was developed around 1548 by a Japanese Catholic namedAnjirō.
Japanese personal names, corporate brands, and other words intended for international use (for example, on business cards, in passports, etc.)
foreign names, words, and phrases, often in scholarly contexts
foreign words deliberately rendered to impart a foreign flavour, for instance, in commercial contexts
other Japanized words derived or originated from foreign languages, such asJリーグ (jei rīgu, "J. League"),Tシャツ (tī shatsu, "T-shirt") orB級グルメ (bī-kyū gurume, "B-rank gourmet [cheap and local cuisines]")
Arabic numerals (as opposed to traditional kanji numerals) are often used to write numbers inhorizontal text, especially when numbering things rather than indicating a quantity, such as telephone numbers, serial numbers and addresses. Arabic numerals were introduced in Japan probably at the same time as the Latin alphabet, in the 16th century during theMuromachi period, the first contact being via Portuguese navigators. These numerals did not originate in Europe, as thePortuguese inherited them during theArab occupation of the Iberian peninsula.
In the modern period,Japanese keyboards, such as the IME (Input Method Editor), primarily default their usage to thefullwidth Unicode Arabic numerals１ as opposed to1, though most actual usage uses the common halfwidth one1, especially when used to represent a quantity. The fullwidth character may be used for spacing purposes aesthetically.
Hentaigana (変体仮名), a set of archaic kana made obsolete by theMeiji reformation, are sometimes used to impart an archaic flavor, like in items of food (esp.soba).
Jukujikun is the writing of words usingkanji that reflect the meaning of the word though the pronunciation of the word is entirely unrelated to the usual pronunciations of the constituentkanji. Conversely,ateji is the employment ofkanji that appear solely to represent the sound of the compound word but are, conceptually, utterly unrelated to the signification of the word.
Sentences are commonly written using a combination of all three Japanese scripts: kanji (in red), hiragana (in purple), and katakana (in orange), and in limited instances also include Latin alphabet characters (in green) and Arabic numerals (in black):
Tシャツを3枚購入しました。
The same text can be transliterated to the Latin alphabet (rōmaji), although this will generally only be done for the convenience of foreign language speakers:
Tīshatsuosan-mai kōnyūshimashita.
Translated into English, this reads:
I bought 3 T-shirts.
All words in modern Japanese can be written using hiragana, katakana, and rōmaji, while only some have kanji. Words that have no dedicated kanji may still be written with kanji by employing eitherateji (as in man'yogana, から = 可良) or jukujikun, as in the title of とある科学の超電磁砲 (超電磁砲 being used to represent レールガン).
is, am, to be (hiragana, of Japanese origin); death (katakana, of English origin)
Although rare, there are some words that use all three scripts in the same word. An example of this is the termくノ一 (rōmaji:kunoichi), which uses a hiragana, a katakana, and a kanji character, in that order. It is said that if all three characters are put in the same kanji "square", they all combine to create the kanji女 (woman/female). Another example is消しゴム (rōmaji:keshigomu) which means "eraser", and uses a kanji, a hiragana, and two katakana characters, in that order.
Collation (word ordering) in Japanese is based on the kana, which express the pronunciation of the words, rather than the kanji. The kana may be ordered using two common orderings, the prevalentgojūon (fifty-sound) ordering, or the old-fashionediroha ordering.Kanji dictionaries are usually collated using theradical system, though other systems, such asSKIP, also exist.
Traditionally, Japanese is written in a format calledtategaki (縦書き), which was inherited from traditional Chinese practice. In this format, the characters are written in columns going from top to bottom, with columns ordered from right to left. After reaching the bottom of each column, the reader continues at the top of the column to the left of the current one.
Modern Japanese also uses another writing format, calledyokogaki (横書き). This writing format is horizontal and reads from left to right, as in English.
A book printed in tategaki opens with the spine of the book to the right, while a book printed in yokogaki opens with the spine to the left.[8]
Japanese is normally written without spaces between words, and text is allowed to wrap from one line to the next without regard for word boundaries. This convention was originally modelled on Chinese writing, where spacing is superfluous because each character is essentially a word in itself (albeit compounds are common). However, in kana and mixed kana/kanji text, readers of Japanese must work out where word divisions lie based on an understanding of what makes sense. For example,あなたはお母さんにそっくりね。 must be mentally divided asあなた / は /お母さん / に /そっくり / ね。 (Anata wa okāsan ni sokkuri ne; "You're just like your mother"). In rōmaji, it may sometimes be ambiguous whether an item should be transliterated as two words or one. For example,愛する ("to love"), composed of愛 (ai; "love") andする (suru; (here a verb-forming suffix)), is variously transliterated asaisuru orai suru.Particles, like the possessive particleの in君の犬 ("your dog"), are sometimes joined with the preceding term (kimino inu), or written as separate words (kimi no inu).
Words in potentially unfamiliar foreign compounds, normally transliterated in katakana, may be separated by a punctuation mark called a中黒 (nakaguro; "middle dot") to aid Japanese readers. For example,ビル・ゲイツ (Biru Geitsu; Bill Gates). This punctuation is also occasionally used to separate native Japanese words, especially in concatenations of kanji characters where there might otherwise be confusion or ambiguity about interpretation, and especially for the full names of people.
The Japanese full stop (。) and comma (、) are used for similar purposes to their English equivalents, though comma usage can be more fluid than is the case in English. There is no clear standard of where the positions of commas should be inserted in a Japanese sentence.[9] The question mark (？) is not used in traditional or formal Japanese, but it may be used in informal writing, or in transcriptions of dialogue where it might not otherwise be clear that a statement was intoned as a question. The exclamation mark (！) is restricted to informal writing. Colons and semicolons are available but are not common in ordinary text. Quotation marks are written as「 ... 」, and nested quotation marks as『 ... 』. Several bracket styles and dashes are available.
Japan's first encounters with Chinese characters may have come as early as the 1st century AD with theKing of Na gold seal, said to have been given byEmperor Guangwu of Han in AD 57 to a Japanese emissary.[10] However, it is unlikely that the Japanese became literate in Chinese writing any earlier than the 4th century AD.[10]
InitiallyChinese characters were not used for writing Japanese, as literacy meant fluency in Classical Chinese, not vernacular Japanese. Eventually a system calledkanbun (漢文) developed. This system, which closely resembledClassical Chinese in grammar and employedkanji, useddiacritics to hint at the Japanese translation. Informalmokkan (木簡) wooden tablets dating from mid-7th to mid-8th century were written in both Classical Chinese and Old Japanesekanbun, suggesting that literacy was widespread in the late 7th century.[11][12] The earliest surviving written history of Japan, theKojiki (古事記), compiled sometime before 712, was written inkanbun. Even today Japanese high schools and some junior high schools teachkanbun as part of the curriculum.
No full-fledged script for written Japanese existed until the development ofman'yōgana (万葉仮名), which adapted kanji for their phonetic value (derived from their Chinese readings) rather than their semantic value. Man'yōgana was initially used to record poetry, as in theMan'yōshū (万葉集), compiled sometime before 759, whence the writing system derives its name. Some scholars claim that man'yōgana originated fromBaekje, but this hypothesis is denied by mainstream Japanese scholars.[13][14] The modernkana, namelyhiragana andkatakana, are simplifications and systemizations of man'yōgana.
Due to the large number of words and concepts enteringJapan fromChina which had no native equivalent, many words entered Japanese directly, with a similar pronunciation to the originalChinese. This Chinese-derived reading is known ason'yomi (音読み), and this vocabulary as a whole is referred to asSino-Japanese in English andkango (漢語) in Japanese. At the same time, native Japanese already had words corresponding to many borrowed kanji. Authors increasingly used kanji to represent these words. This Japanese-derived reading is known askun'yomi (訓読み). A kanji may have none, one, or several on'yomi and kun'yomi.Okurigana are written after the initial kanji for verbs and adjectives to give inflection and to help disambiguate a particular kanji's reading. The same character may be read several different ways depending on the word. For example, the character行 is readi as the first syllable ofiku (行く; "to go"),okona as the first three syllables ofokonau (行う; "to carry out"),gyō in the compound wordgyōretsu (行列; "line" or "procession"),kō in the wordginkō (銀行; "bank"), andan in the wordandon (行灯; "lantern").
Somelinguists have compared the Japanese borrowing of Chinese-derived vocabulary as akin to the influx of Romance vocabulary into English during theNorman conquest of England. Like English, Japanese has manysynonyms of differing origin, with words from both Chinese and native Japanese. Sino-Japanese is often considered more formal or literary, just as latinate words in English often mark a higherregister.
The significant reforms of the 19th centuryMeiji era did not initially impact the Japanese writing system. However, the language itself was changing due to the increase in literacy resulting from education reforms, the massive influx of words (both borrowed from other languages or newly coined), and the ultimate success of movements such as the influentialgenbun itchi (言文一致) which resulted in Japanese being written in the colloquial form of the language instead of the wide range of historical and classical styles used previously. The difficulty of written Japanese was a topic of debate, with several proposals in the late 19th century that the number of kanji in use be limited. In addition, exposure to non-Japanese texts led to unsuccessful proposals that Japanese be written entirely in kana or rōmaji. This period saw Western-style punctuation marks introduced into Japanese writing.[15]
In 1900, theEducation Ministry introduced three reforms aimed at improving the process of education in Japanese writing:
standardization of hiragana, eliminating the range of hentaigana then in use;
restriction of the number of kanji taught in elementary schools to about 1,200;
reform of the irregular kana representation of the Sino-Japanese readings of kanji to make them conform with the pronunciation.
The first two of these were generally accepted, but the third was hotly contested, particularly byconservatives, to the extent that it was withdrawn in 1908.[16]
The partial failure of the 1900 reforms combined with the rise of nationalism in Japan effectively prevented further significant reform of the writing system. The period beforeWorld War II saw numerous proposals to restrict the number of kanji in use, and several newspapers voluntarily restricted their kanji usage and increased usage offurigana; however, there was no official endorsement of these, and much opposition. However, one successful reform was the standardization of hiragana, which involved reducing the possibilities of writing down Japanese morae down to only one hiragana character per morae, which led to labeling all the other previously used hiragana as hentaigana and discarding them in daily use.[17]
The period immediately following World War II saw a rapid and significant reform of the writing system. This was in part due to influence of the Occupation authorities, but to a significant extent was due to the removal of traditionalists from control of the educational system, which meant that previously stalled revisions could proceed. The major reforms were:
tōyō kanji (当用漢字) (1946), a collection of 1850 characters for use in schools, textbooks, etc.;
kanji to be used in schools (1949);
an additional collection ofjinmeiyō kanji (人名用漢字), which, supplementing thetōyō kanji, could be used in personal names (1951);
simplifications of various complex kanji letter-formsshinjitai (新字体).
At one stage, an advisor in the Occupation administration proposed a wholesale conversion to rōmaji, but it was not endorsed by other specialists and did not proceed.[18]
In addition, the practice of writinghorizontally in a right-to-left direction was generally replaced by left-to-right writing. The right-to-left order was considered a special case of vertical writing, with columns one character high, rather than horizontal writing per se; it was used for single lines of text on signs, etc. (e.g., the station sign at Tokyo reads駅京東, which is東京駅 from right-to-left).[8] The post-war reforms have mostly survived, although some of the restrictions have been relaxed. The replacement of thetōyō kanji in 1981 with the 1,945jōyō kanji (常用漢字)—a modification of thetōyō kanji—was accompanied by a change from "restriction" to "recommendation", and in general the educational authorities have become less active in further script reform.[19] In 2004, thejinmeiyō kanji (人名用漢字), maintained by theMinistry of Justice for use in personal names, was significantly enlarged. Thejōyō kanji list was later extended to 2,136 characters in 2010.[4]
There are a number of methods of rendering Japanese in Roman letters. TheHepburn method ofromanization, designed for English speakers, is ade factostandard widely used inside and outside Japan. TheKunrei-shiki system has a better correspondence withJapanese phonology. There are differences in the romanization, such as Kunrei-shiki writing "ち" as "ti", while the Hepburn writes it as "chi".[20] Other systems of romanization includeNihon-shiki,JSL, andWāpuro rōmaji.
^"ローマ字表記 70年ぶり改定も視野に 文化庁の審議会に検討諮問 | NHK" [Agency for Cultural Affairs asks council to consider first romanization change in 70 years].NHK News. May 14, 2024. Archived fromthe original on May 14, 2024. RetrievedFebruary 7, 2025.
