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Kanji Calligraphy

Kanji calligraphy originated from Chinese characters that were first introduced to Japan in the 5th century. While the characters are Chinese in origin, the style of writing them evolved differently in Japan. Kanji became the official writing system in Japan after Buddhist monks traveling between China and Japan helped spread its use. The art of Kanji calligraphy is still practiced today, with elementary school students in Japan learning over 1,000 characters and testing on up to 6,000 characters to demonstrate mastery.

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Biji Ravindran
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293 views3 pages

Kanji Calligraphy

Kanji calligraphy originated from Chinese characters that were first introduced to Japan in the 5th century. While the characters are Chinese in origin, the style of writing them evolved differently in Japan. Kanji became the official writing system in Japan after Buddhist monks traveling between China and Japan helped spread its use. The art of Kanji calligraphy is still practiced today, with elementary school students in Japan learning over 1,000 characters and testing on up to 6,000 characters to demonstrate mastery.

Uploaded by

Biji Ravindran
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Kanji Calligraphy

BIJI RAVINDRAN
Kanji refers to the Chinese characters used in modern Japanese writing and Kanji calligraphy
evolves from there. These characters were first said to be introduced to Japan during the 5 th
century. Even though the characters used are Chinese, the difference lies in the strokes and
styles used for writing.

Chinese characters were first introduced to Japan through the imported articles from China. The
first instance was known to have occurred during 57 AD through the import of a gold seal by an
emperor of the Han Dynasty. The word Kanji is adopted from the Chinese word Hanzi which
means Han characters and the word Han here refers to the Han dynasty. Before these Chinese
characters were introduced, there were no scripts in Japan. As the Chinese characters were
adopted to create a new scripting called Kanji Calligraphy, the Japanese accepted the original
pronunciations of the characters and associated them with their Japanese pronunciations and
words. As a result, kanji characters have two way pronunciations; the Chinese or “on yomi”
and the Japanese or “kun yomi” way.

The art of Kanji calligraphy still has high regards in Japan. During the end of 4 th century, a
Korean writer named Wani brought some classics of Confucius like the Analects of Confucius,
Book of Mencius and Great Learning, to Japan and introduced the Chinese characters to the
Japanese writing world. From the beginning of the 7th century, a lot of Japanese scholars were
said to have travelled to China, and some Chinese scholars went to Japan. Buddhist monks
were a part of them. As a result of the growth of Indian Buddhism in Japan, Kanji calligraphy
also took its root there, eventually becoming the official writing system in Japan.

The Chinese monks who went to live in Japan were famous scholars and good calligraphers.
Their writings and works on Buddhist scriptures and other subjects were given a lot of
importance for their richness in calligraphy and religious aspects. Many of the Japanese
emperors who lived during that period were ardent followers of Buddhism and some of them
mastered in Kanji Calligraphy. The Zen priests of Japan also created calligraphic arts intending
to induce a religious awe on to the minds of the Japanese. They were responsible for the origin
of the Japanese Zen Calligraphy or bokuseki.

In modern Japanese writing, Kanji is often used to write nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs.
However it was impossible to write Japanese entirely in Kanji. Moreover, adopting a foreign
language script was considered unsuitable by most of them. Therefore, after the introduction of
Kanji, Japanese scholars began to frame a purely new Japanese script, which is the hiragana.
Hiragana or onna-de in Japanese and was used for creating Japanese poetry. Apart from kanji
and hiragana, the other script used in Japanese calligraphy is katakana. Both hiragana and
katakana consist of 46 syllables.
Kanji characters are ideograms as each character used has its own meaning and equals to a
word. The use of more characters created more words. The characters usually represent whole
words or parts of words. Even though there are thousands of characters created in Kanji
Calligraphy, most of them are not of use. The government has accepted around 2,000 of them
for regular use. The elementary school children of Japan learn 1,006 Kanji characters by the end
of the sixth grade and the middle school students start practicing with these 1,006 characters
and learn another 939.

The character writing in Japan has two important stages. First a learner gets familiar with the
tools and equipments used and learn the basic techniques to carry on the writing. This is the
Shuji stage. Once the level is mastered, the student learns a more artistic level of writing called
Shodo, where each student must properly understand the history and use of the calligraphic
tools. This is the final step to master the art.

With the introduction of various calligraphic styles, the Calligraphers were forced to refine their
techniques to take their writing style into the highest levels. Through lots of experimentations,
they took Shodo to the present level of achievement. The Government of Japan has to be
appreciated as they introduced an aptitude test on Kanji called Kanji kentei, which tests one’s
proficiency in kanji characters. Around 6,000 kanji characters are tested to reach the topmost
level of Kanji. As they care to preserve the sanctity of the Kanji Calligraphy, there are a lot more
Kanji calligraphers in the making who can take this art to more levels of achievement.

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