The fascination of Kanji

The one thing that will never stop fascinating me is kanji. The idea alone of kanji is mind boggling to me. These small detailed pictograms, these small creations of imagination that I see inscribed everywhere are more than just pictograms. They carry with them the history of Japan, the very nature of Japan, of the Japanese way of doing, of thinking, of simply being.

I have a book where everyday I avidly search for new images, new combinations, new horizons, and it never fails me. I learn new basic kanji and then see them stacked one on the other, miniaturised yet just a precise, to form more complex kanji in which sometimes the meaning of their building blocks remains hidden to the inflexible mind, but opens a totally new world of associations to he who wants to explore: the semantics of picture combinations.

The moment I thought, I had finally understood the true meaning of the strokes that combine, separate and re-combine, in that very moment, Japan hit me with all of its history.

Let me explain: early Japan had no written language. The language was passed on from one generation to the next only through the spoken word. It was only when Chinese characters first arrived via the trading routes (the date is of course not known precisely but is thought to be around 60 AD), that Japan started having a way of documenting events and other important matters. Over the centuries, Chinese characters were increasingly incorporated into Japan. At first, Japanese documents are thought to have been written by Chinese emigrants. Later, groups of people started learning how to read and write the characters and around the 6^th century documents written in Japan started showing modifications which indicated the beginning of the true absorption of Chinese characters in the thus newly born Japanese written language.

In order to be able to write their own spoke language, a limited set of Chinese characters was used. These characters however were not chosen based on their meaning but of course based on their sound. It is in this manner that over the years and after numerous simplifications, the two writing systems, hiragana and katakana, were born. These two kana each contain 46 basic characters and are either vowels or combinations of consonants and vowels, like ka, or ma. Nowadays, katakana is used to write non-Japanese words whereas hiragana is used for grammar, like verb and adjective endings, or for writing of the pronunciation of the kanji characters (important for children in the early stages of learning due to the complex process of Kanji learning).

katakana and its origin

hiragana and its origin

Nowadays, the Japanese kanji are quite different to the Chinese characters, hanzi. Many modifications have been made over the centuries and what remains is a very complicated system. Many kanji have one or more “readings” (some have 10!). Two such readings are the on-yumi and the kun-yumi. The kun-yumi is the Japanese pronunciation which is related to the meaning of the original Chinese pictogram. The on-yumi is the Japanese approximation of the way the character way pronounced in China at the time of its introduction in Japan (within the on-yumi class, there are of course many sub-classes…it would otherwise be far too simple!).

Some kanji also have two different ways in which they can be written: old-style and new-style. While the kanji in the old-style are almost completely the same to the Chinese hanzi, those written in new-style are quite different and arose after simplifications introduced after World War II.

This, my friends, is the one-third of the iceberg which has revealed itself to me over the past 3 weeks. I long to find out about the remaining two-thirds and to share what I can of it with you.

(images source: wikipedia.org; author: Pmx)