The Kanji

The kanji represent the only writing system that dates from the ancient world. Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mesopotamian cuneiform writing, and Indus characters, also dating back to the beginnings of civilization, have since disappeared from use. The origins of the kanji are lost in the mists of history, but the primitive forms of the kanji found on bone fragments and turtle shells in China date back to a time between 4800 and 4200 bce. Later inscriptions on bronze, dating from the Shang period (1523–1028 bce), are often more complex than the earlier bone and shell fragments, leading some scholars to think that they may actually be older. In any case, both these forms of writings are more pictographic than present-day kanji, but as they came into wider and wider use as a means of writing the spoken language, their form became more abstract and simplified. As these abbreviated shapes increased in number, periodical revisions simplified the form still further and gradually brought the whole system under the control of guiding principles.

   The kanji are commonly referred to as ideographs. Unlike phonetic alphabets, individual symbols do not indicate pronunciation but represent a specific meaning, concrete or abstract, which can then be combined with other characters to form more complex meanings or ideas. Since the kanji began in China, the sounds assigned to these ideographs reflected the spoken languages of China. As the kanji spread to other countries and other language groups—Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, and finally Japan—their pronunciation and usage changed accordingly.

   When the kanji were first introduced into Japan in the late fifth century CE, there was no existing system of writing for the Japanese language, only a language with a different structure and different sounds. In the process of adjusting the kanji to Japanese, two things happened. First, kanji had to be chosen to represent the sounds of the language. This was done by approximating these sounds to already existing pronunciations of the kanji. Second, Japanese sounds were used to form new words, not previously existing in Japanese.

   The most complete list of kanji that exists counts some 80,000 distinct characters, but they have never all been used in any given period. In the case of Japan, a list of 1,945 characters have been nominated as “daily-use kanji” in 1981, and these are the kanji that are taught to all children in the schools and have produced virtual total literacy in what is certainly the most complex writing system in the world today.