Meanwhile, hiragana came to be used at court by aristocratic women and their correspondents. Although they had not created it, women of the nobility adopted hiragana as their own. Studying kanji was not considered proper for women, but hiragana – perhaps because of its home-grown, informal associations – was fair game. In their hands, hiragana matured in the high cultural and aesthetic environment of the tenth-century Heian court. Aristocratic women studied calligraphy, composed and memorized poems, and wrote diaries. Women used their diaries to write colorful narrative memoirs in hiragana, while men recorded in theirs the day’s events in a more formal modified Chinese style. Women’s diaries became an established literary genre, to the extent that one man, Ki no Tsurayuki, had to circulate his hiragana diary in 935 under a female pseudonym. Part of Sei Shnagon’s Pillow Book of around 1001, one of the two most famous works of the period, is in diary style, though it also contains poems, opinion essays, and lists.
Noblewomen were highly protected creatures, hidden from view behind screens and curtains. From there they had the leisure to observe and reflect on the characters and behavior of the people around them, and to incorporate their insights into their writing, giving Japanese fiction a new level of depth and maturity. Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji, written in the first decade or two of the eleventh century, is considered by many to be the world’s first true novel, as contrasted with earlier epics and tales with more two-dimensional characters.
Genji is not only a remarkable literary accomplishment; it is also a valuable first-hand account of the role of writing among the Heian nobility. Women could not be looked upon, but they could be corresponded with; and their beauty of soul and character was supposedly expressed in their handwriting. Great importance was laid on the kind of paper used, the elegance of the (hiragana) handwriting, and the allusive and literary beauty of the poems that were exchanged between correspondents. Despite the protective measures surrounding women, romantic affairs were frequent (though probably, then as now, more frequent in fiction than in real life) and were relatively well tolerated, provided the woman was single and the man’s rank did not disgrace her. Writing was crucial to the romance: by custom the successful consummation of an affair required a “morning after” letter from the man.
The literary style of Genji and other works of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, mostly by women, marked a high point in Japanese literature. The style was almost pure Japanese, with very few Chinese loanwords. The deliberate cultivation of a high aesthetic in court circles was expressed in literature by the development of an elegant, evocative native style. The fact that the vocabulary was native – in the mother tongue, rather than the stilted, intellectual borrowed Chinese vocabulary – meant that both the hiragana prose and poetry of the period had an emotional resonance that other styles did not.
Paradoxically, this success at writing the mother tongue spelled the end of writing in a spoken style. Written down – fossilized – the graceful eleventh-century style was imitated in the writing of pure Japanese for centuries thereafter, with the result that the written and spoken languages soon diverged.
Although Japanese writing had come of age, having attained its own formalized, classical style, it was still not considered fit for official purposes. Official documents were still written in Chinese, and many male poets composed poetry in Chinese. Unofficially, however, the two separate written traditions – native Japanese in kana and formal Chinese in kanji – gradually began to merge. The beginnings of the modern compromise began to be reached as, starting in the twelfth century, literary styles appeared that were in Japanese but made free use of Chinese loanwords and were written in a mixture of kanji and kana, most often katakana.
In the succeeding feudal period (1192 to 1602), the first inklings of compromise touched officialdom. The influence of the imperial court and the old aristocracy was greatly diminished, and real power was in the hand of the shogun and of feudal lords. They were served by the samurai, men of the warrior class, who became the new bureaucrats. Without the education of their predecessors at the imperial court, the samurai gave up on proper Chinese and used modified Chinese in official documents.
The shogunate of Tokugawa Ieyasu ushered in a period of peace and prosperity known as the Edo period (1603 to 1867). Literacy spread from the highest-placed samurai throughout the warrior class. Schools were also established for children of commoners, and literacy in kana, with some kanji, began to spread. Printing techniques improved, and the publishing business prospered.
During the Edo period Japan was closed to outside influence, with small and carefully monitored exceptions made for Chinese, Korean, and Dutch traders. With the dawn of the succeeding Meiji era (1868 to 1911), Japan took stock of its position as compared to the West and decided it was time to modernize. Education was reformed and made compulsory. Written language, it was decreed, should more closely resemble the spoken language. Official documents were now to be written in Japanese syntax, with katakana mixed in with the kanji to provide particles and inflections. After more than a millennium’s dominance, writing in Chinese or modified Chinese finally lost its special status. The syntax of written Japanese, however, was still heavily influenced by the Classical Japanese of the Heian period until the twentieth century.
Japanese written style was far from homogeneous, however. Words could be written in kanji, in hiragana, or in katakana, or in some mixture of the three, the proportions in the mixture being open to variation. A small minority of zealous reformers even advocated replacing both kanji and kana with the Roman alphabet.
The present orthographic conventions in Japan are based on policies implemented after World War II. Modern Japanese writing finds a place for kanji, hiragana, and katakana, with the result that Japanese texts are written in three different scripts. Most nouns, verbs, and adjectives, plus some adverbs, are written in kanji. There are 1,945 characters on the government’s list of “common kanji,” with 284 more to be used in personal names and place names. The most frequently used 2,000 kanji account for 99 percent of the kanji in most texts. However, since specialized fields have their own specialized vocabulary, a total of 4,000 or 5,000 kanji are in active use in Japan today.
The 1,945 common kanji have, between them, 4,087 readings, a little over two readings per character, on average. Most have at least one Sino-Japanese (on) reading and at least one native (kun) reading. There may be more than one on reading, and there may also be more than one kun reading, as synonyms or near synonyms in the native vocabulary may be written with the same kanji. A fair number have only on readings. A few kanji have been created in Japan and therefore lack on readings (though one of them has actually acquired a pseudo- on reading). A few also lack on readings in the officially recommended list of kanji, due to the government’s efforts to rein in the explosion of kanji readings, but they have had on readings in the past.
Given the multiplicity of readings, it can be difficult to know how to read kanji, especially where proper names are involved (the same can be said of English, actually, where a family named Cholmondeley may live at Greenwich, on the Thames). Words consisting of a single kanji are usually read in their kun readings. Compounds are usually, but not always, given on readings, and the particular on reading will depend on the meaning of the compound. Some compounds are to be read as kun, though, and a few are mixed between on and kun.
Native Japanese words that are not assigned to a kanji are normally written in hiragana. This includes auxiliary verbs, many adverbs, and any other words whose kanji have become obsolete. Hiragana is also used for the particles that follow nouns, and for inflectional suffixes of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Questions as to which kun reading of a character is intended are often resolved by the inflectional material in hiragana that follows, which may repeat part of the word stem as a kind of phonetic complement. For example, if the kanji , meaning “to catch, grasp,” is followed by hiragana , raeru, then it is read toraeru. If it is followed by , maeru, then i
t is read tsukamaeru, another kun reading with the same basic meaning. Hiragana is also used to spell out the kun readings of kanji when needed.
Katakana, on the other hand, serves a function in modern written Japanese much like that of italics in English. Like italics, it conveys emphasis. It also expresses that a particular word is not an everyday word of Japanese. An increasing number of words from European languages, and especially English, are flooding into Japanese. These modern loanwords appear in texts in katakana, as do foreign words and names transliterated into Japanese. Certain specialized names of plants, animals, and chemicals are written in katakana, especially in scientific writing. Some female given names lack a kanji version and are written in katakana. Another class of words written in katakana includes onomatopoeia and similar, often reduplicated words with evocative sounds (analogous to words like “eensy-weensy” or “pitter-pat” in English). Katakana is also used for specialized children’s vocabulary, exclamations, colloquialisms, and slang. Telegrams are written and sent in katakana. On readings of kanji are transliterated into katakana to distinguish them from kun readings, transliterated into hiragana.
The Japanese mixture of three scripts is a complicated writing system that takes years to master and discourages many a foreigner from even attempting to learn the language. Japanese readers are nowadays also exposed to increasing amounts of Romanized text, especially in advertising, raising the number of scripts used in some contexts to four. Yet anything written in Japanese could theoretically be written in either of the two kana scripts: why not just keep hiragana, say, and dispense with the rest? Hiragana is easily learned, and the Japanese language, with its simple syllable structure, is well suited to a syllabary. As compared to an alphabet, a syllabary is easy to learn to read. The process of sounding out words actually produces words: the pronunciation of the sequence of signs is the pronunciation of the word itself. Compare “hiragana,” which can be read off as hi-raga-na, with a very simple alphabetic word like English bet. The word bet is not pronounced as the sequence of its letters, bee-ee-tee (phonetically [bi i ti]), nor of the sounds we tell children they stand for: [b ε t]. The consonant sounds that b and t represent are not pronounceable except when combined with vowel sounds. Sounding out words, therefore, involves far more than just learning the alphabet. By contrast, in a syllabary consonants and vowels come in precombined pronounceable packages. There are more symbols to memorize, but once they are learned, reading is easy. Indeed, most Japanese children learn hiragana before starting formal schooling. The educational system assumes children entering the first grade know hiragana, and concentrates on teaching katakana (first three grades) and kanji (the object of at least nine years of study).
Though kana is easy, kanji are objectively difficult to learn – the more so because the phonetic complements embedded in kanji characters, vague enough in Chinese, have no bearing at all on their Japanese kun readings. Kanji that are seldom used are easily forgotten (though, to be fair, so are spellings in English). Despite its complexities, the kanji–kana mixed writing system is retained. And it works. Japan manages an impressive literacy rate: virtually all students emerge from the nine years of compulsory education with at least functional literacy of a level that enables them to hold productive jobs in their modern industrial society. Most people do better: a well-educated reader knows about 3,000 kanji, 1,000 more than the official list. A large number of classroom hours are devoted to studying written Japanese, yet Japan also does well at educating its students in math and science.
An important reason for the retention of such a complex writing system is the fact that the needs of the user and the needs of the learner of a technology are often quite different. A hiragana-only writing system would be simple to learn, and it would do its job adequately (especially if word spacing were added), but kanji would be sorely missed by experienced readers, and not only for sentimental reasons.
Figure 7.2 A Japanese proverb written in (1) a mixture of kanji, katakana, and hiragana, (2) hiragana only, (3) katakana only. Also given are the Romanization (known as rmaji in Japanese), a word-for-word translation, English translation, and interpretation. To a Japanese reader, the kanji words for “couple,” “dog,” and “eat” stand out as content words. The use of katakana for the word for “quarrel” indicates emphasis; in kanji it would be . The grammatical words and particles (topic marker, “even,” and negative particle) are in hiragana. Thus the first version provides more linguistic clues than the second or third (kana-only) versions.
A text in mixed kanji–kana conveys a considerable amount of information that would be lost in a purely phonological script like hiragana. At a glance, the content words – which convey what the text is actually about – are distinguished from the grammatical words and suffixes, the former written in kanji and the latter in hiragana (see figure 7.2). The contrast between content words and grammatical words like the, in, at, with, and it is one that is nowhere marked in English orthography, but it is nevertheless a linguistically real distinction. By visually marking it, Japanese orthography gives clues to the syntactic function of its individual words. Skimming a text is made much easier, as the important words stand out from the grammatical window dressing.
Users of kanji also value the ability of the logograms to distinguish between homophones, of which Japanese has a large number, especially in its formal, Sino-Japanese vocabulary. If written in hiragana, the words “four,” “city,” “paper,” “arrow,” plus 43 other Sino-Japanese words would all be rendered simply as , shi. Understandably, writers resist such “simplification,” realizing that written language, divorced as it is from the interactive context of speech, must work harder to avoid ambiguity. In kanji, even if it isn’t obvious whether the on or kun reading is intended, the basic meaning will be clear. The Japanese writing system puts more emphasis on conveying the meaning of a word than on conveying its pronunciation.
The use of katakana rather than hiragana also conveys useful linguistic information. In most uses, katakana signals that there is something unusual about the word recorded – it draws attention to it as a collection of sounds, outside the usual category of Japanese words. This is especially helpful in the case of loanwords. The restricted number of syllables in Japanese means that foreign words must be adjusted to fit a native shape. Because the writing is syllabic, this adjustment happens both in speech and in writing. The resulting words, if written in hiragana, would not signal their foreignness in the way that foreign words often do in alphabetic spellings. To take an example from English, Przewalski’s horses were clearly not named after an Englishman. English words do not contain prz-sequences, though the letters p, r, and z are all part of the writing system. In a syllabary, however, the syllabic adjustments to a foreign word make it look normal (although very strange to the foreigner: strawberry, for example, comes out sutoroberi). So it is the use of katakana that signals that the word is foreign.
The linguistic richness of the Japanese writing system exacted a price, however: Japan missed out on the typewriter age. The first successfully marketed American typewriter appeared in the 1870s. By contrast, the first Japanese kanji–kana typewriters came out only in 1915. These were monstrous things – expensive, slow, with huge trays full of symbols, and requiring specially trained operators. Few businesses could afford one; most subcontracted out their typing. The vast majority of office documents were handwritten.
The first katakana typewriter appeared in 1923, prior to the postwar script reforms that favored hiragana over katakana. It never became popular: by 1958 only about 10,000 katakana typewriters were in use in the entire country. They were fast, portable, and efficient, but people complained that they could not easily read the text. For one thing, the writing was horizontal, as compared to the traditional top-to-bottom orientation. For another, people found the spelling of homophones confusing, as also the inefficient, oddly spaced-out nature of the text, as it unrolled its message slowly, syllable by syllable. Typists had to remember to i
nclude spaces between words to avoid serious ambiguities (word spacing is not normally used in Japanese, as the switch from kanji to kana signals that one is reaching the end of a word). Nevertheless, some companies adopted katakana typewriters for their billing departments. In this restricted context they were adequate and efficient.
A hiragana typewriter was brought out in 1962, but it also failed to become popular. By this time, however, it was clear that Japan was falling behind the West in the area of office automation, in contrast with its impressive levels of industrial productivity. Fax machines and photocopiers were adopted enthusiastically, but could help only so much, as the originals of most office documents still had to be handwritten. Typing was reserved for a final, clean copy of documents when it was worth the expense. Proponents of Romanization and of kana-only writing had a strong argument: Japan should abandon kanji in order to keep its place as a modern, industrial nation. This would mean turning its back on its own history and entirely revamping its educational infrastructure, but wasn’t it worth it, for the sake of progress?
As it turned out, Japan’s history was saved by its technology. The prospects for kanji began to brighten in 1978, when Toshiba unveiled a word processor that could handle both kanji and kana. The user would type in kana and at the press of a button the word processor would convert appropriate stretches into kanji, giving the user choices in cases of homophones. (I have used the same basic system to type the Japanese in this chapter: I type on the Roman keyboard, which appears on screen in hiragana, which will convert to kanji if I press “enter.”)
The Writing Revolution Page 16