Origins of Japanese Writing
The Japanese language is a “language isolate” – meaning it is not known to have “descended” from any other language. Its origin is a mystery. We do know, however, that Japanese originally had no writing system of its own.
Written language was first introduced to Japan by traders from China in the early centuries CE. Coins, seals, and documents carried Classical Chinese logography (writing where each character represents a single word, idea, or concept).
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Starting around the 6th century CE, the Japanese began writing official documents in Chinese, and eventually they also used Chinese characters to represent the phonetic sounds of Japanese words. The characters’ complexity made this difficult, so they were simplified into new characters called Kana. The first Kana syllabary (alphabet where each character represents a syllable) was Hiragana, used primarily by women who were denied education and thus couldn’t learn to read Chinese. A second syllabary called Katakana was created by monks and clergy transcribing religious documents.
Modern Japanese uses all three character sets in combination: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji – the name given to the logographs borrowed from China. This makes written Japanese one of the most complex writing systems in existence today.
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