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Lecture on "The Reception History of Chinese Characters in Ancient Japan: From the Use of Chinese Characters to the Creation of Kana" by Researcher Xu Jianxin

2024-01-02

Wen Jing reports: On December 22, 2023, Researcher Xu Jianxin of the Institute of World History gave a lecture entitled "The Reception History of Chinese Characters in Ancient Japan: From the Use of Chinese Character to the Creation of Kana" in Conference Room 320 of the Guantong Building of the Chinese Academy of History. This lecture is the 14th in a series of lectures on "Dialogue of Ancient Civilizations" jointly organized by the Center for Comparative Studies of Chinese Civilization and Ancient Civilizations (Ancient Egypt, Ancient Babylon, and Ancient India) of the Chinese Academy of History and the Ancient and Medieval History Department of the Institute of World History. All the staff of the Department and scholars and students from other research institutions attended the lecture.

Researcher Xu Jianxin suggested that the emergence of Japanese writing was intertwined with complex social and historical changes and that the process of the use of writing should be linked to the historical process of Japanese society.

Chinese characters appeared in Japan around the first century B.C., in the middle of the Yayoi period. The Japanese began their attempts to write their language in Chinese characters, causing a mismatch between spoken language and writing. Moreover, the Chinese characters to the ancient Japanese were not only a foreign script but also a symbol of a more mature civilization. Japan learned from Chinese civilization in many aspects such as politics, economy, ideology, and culture, and therefore could not abandon the use of Chinese characters. Under these circumstances, they found their way to understand and read Chinese and preserved their spoken language in the meantime. This was the direction in which the construction of the ancient Japanese script evolved.

The Manyogana is a system of writing that uses Chinese characters to represent phonetic sounds. Katakana and hiragana emerged in the eighth and ninth centuries. Katakana was first popular among the intellectuals and gradually spread to the general population. Hiragana was initially the writing of noblewomen in the Heian period and then was adopted by the samurai class and ordinary people in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods.

According to researcher Xu Jianxin, the creation of the kana script marked the establishment of Japanese writing over a period of eight to nine centuries. During this period, the ancient Japanese used Chinese characters as a medium for absorbing the ideologies and cultures of the East Asian continent, contributing to the formation and development of the ancient Japanese state.

After the lecture, researcher Xu Jianxin had a discussion with the scholars attending the lecture on the emergence of characters, the borrowing of characters between civilizations, and cultural diffusion.

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