The Japanese language had no written form at the time Chinese characters were introduced, and texts were written and read only in Chinese. The oldest written kanji in Japan discovered so far were written in ink on wood as a wooden strip dated to the 7th century, a record of trading for cloth and salt. These wooden boards were used for communication between government offices, tags for goods transported between various countries, and the practice of writing. In ancient times, paper was so rare that people wrote kanji onto thin, rectangular strips of wood, called mokkan ( 木簡). During the reign of Empress Suiko (593–628), the Yamato court began sending full-scale diplomatic missions to China, which resulted in a large increase in Chinese literacy at the Japanese court.
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Later, groups of people called fuhito were organized under the monarch to read and write Classical Chinese. For example, the diplomatic correspondence from King Bu of Wa to Emperor Shun of Liu Song in 478 has been praised for its skillful use of allusion. The earliest Japanese documents were probably written by bilingual Chinese or Korean officials employed at the Yamato court. According to the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki, a semi-legendary scholar called Wani was dispatched to Japan by the Kingdom of Baekje during the reign of Emperor Ōjin in the early fifth century, bringing with him knowledge of Confucianism and Chinese characters. However, the Japanese people of that era probably had little to no comprehension of the script, and they would remain relatively illiterate until the fifth century AD, when writing in Japan became more widespread. Chinese coins as well as inkstones from the first century AD have also been found in Yayoi period archaeological sites.
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The earliest known instance of such an import was the King of Na gold seal given by Emperor Guangwu of Han to a Wa emissary in 57 AD. Nihon Shoki (720 AD), considered by historians and archeologists as the most complete extant historical record of ancient Japan, was written entirely in kanji.Ĭhinese characters first came to Japan on official seals, letters, swords, coins, mirrors, and other decorative items imported from China.
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For example, 誠, meaning "honest" in both Chinese and Japanese, is pronounced makoto or sei in Japanese, but pronounced chéng in Standard Mandarin Chinese. Īlthough some kanji have similar meanings and pronunciations as used in Japanese and Chinese, others have meanings and pronunciations that are unique to one language or the other. Inkstone artifacts at archaeological sites dating back to the earlier Yayoi period were also found to contain Chinese characters. The usage of Chinese characters in Japan first began to significantly take hold around the 5th century AD, and has since then made a profound influence in shaping Japanese culture, language, literature, history and its records until today. The term kanji literally means " Han characters", and this word is spelled in Japanese using the same characters as traditional Chinese in reference to the character writing system, which is known as hanzi ( traditional Chinese: 漢字 simplified Chinese: 汉字 pinyin: hànzì lit. More specifically, it refers to that set of Chinese characters directly incorporated into the written Japanese language with often Japanese pronunciation, inclusive of those few characters invented in Japan based on character components derived from other Chinese characters.
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The word kanji ( 漢字, pronounced ( listen)) comes from the Japanese word for logographic characters of the Chinese script, which were made a major part of the Japanese writing system along with the syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana. For the distinction between, / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).