Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 170

SYLLABIC SYSTEMS OF WRITING
Japanese Scripts
169
Prehistoric Japanese "Writings"
The Japanese have never had a script of indigenous creation, although such a writing is mentioned in the ancient historical work Shoku-nihongi, belonging to eighth century A.D. (?). According to local traditions the Japanese used in early times a knot-device as means of communication, but (as already said in the Introduction), a knot-device cannot be considered as true writing. On the other hand, the origins of the ancient, long forgotten Japanese scripts, ahiru, ijumo, anaichi, iyo and moritsune, are uncertain. It is generally accepted that these shinji or kami no moji ("divine characters") termed also jindaimoji or kamiyo no moji ("characters of the divine period"), have descended from the Korean script Nitok (see p. 444). or constituted a secondary branch of it, but there is no evidence corroborating such theory. At any rate, there is no connection between these prehistoric Japanese scripts and modern Japanese writing.
Origin of Japanese Scripts
As regards her culture, Japan must, in a certain way, be regarded as a colony of China, but the beginnings of Chinese influence upon Japan lie in the same obscurity as the rest of early Japanese history. Most Chinese influences, according to the accepted tradition, reached Japan by way of Korea. Thus the Japanese, either directly or through Korea, were inevitably led to adopt the Chinese system of writing, The earliest trade and cultural relations between China and Japan may be dated in the last centuries B.C., but the introduction of Chinese writing into Japan would seem to have taken place somewhere in the third or fourth century A.D.
According to tradition, in the third century A.D., Japan sent envoys to Korea in search of men of learning. They back one Onin or Wang Jên, a wise man of the imperial family in taught the Japanese Chinese writing and instructed them in the culture of his nation. He was later deified. Another tradition attributes the introduction of Chinese writing into Japan to two Korean scholars, Ajiki and Wani, the tutors of a Japanese crown prince of the fifth century A.D. After the introduction of Buddhism many Chinese scholars and priests emigrated to Japan. Thus the study of both the Chinese language and the Chinese script increased enormously, and obviously the necessity arose for the translation of Chinese works into Japanese and for the adaptation of Chinese writing to Japanese. This adaptation was, from the very beginning, no easy matter, as can be seen from the Kojiki (a kind of Japanese ancient history, of A.D. 711-712), in which Chinese symbols are written with Chinese syntax but are intended to be read differently.
In order to realize the great difficulties in the adaptation of Chinese writing to Japanese speech-apart from the fact that Japanese, unlike