So, Japanese Aesthetics is drawing to a close (I’m splashing tears on the keyboard as I type), so I thought, what better than to start a brand new series. Enter: Guest_bloggers. Before you continue with this post, check out more details about what to expect here; after that, make sure you hit that ‘Back’ button like you’ve never hit it before!

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s most definitely a bit of a linguistic theme hanging around Caught*Red-handed at the moment. Of course, when I say ‘a bit’, I actually mean a hell of a lot, however, soon enough, I’ll be kicking that particular bucket and moving onto something else, no doubt. Before I do though, there can be no better way of kicking off my Guest_bloggers series than with an invite to the C*R-h stage for the ever so dashing Mr Brett Fyfield. What follows is an impart of some of his superior knowledge on the Japanese written form. A regular crack linguist, Edufire tutor, and general good guy, please allow me to introduce an expert in the field of hiragana..

A recent article in the Japan times proclaimed the birth of Kanji’s first son, Hiragana. But I beg to differ on two points. The first that Kanji had a bastard son, Man’yougana, and second, that Hiragana was not a son at all, but a beautiful baby girl.

To understand where this story began we need to go back to the Nara Period where the influence of mainland China on Japan was all pervading; religion, art and the lifestyle of the nobility resembled more the court life in China than the images of valiant samurai and sublime geisha we are familiar with today.

The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves
A wise man once said that the the art of writing and the art of painting are inextricably linked by the brush. And so it was that those of noble lineage took up the brush and penned great anthologies of poetry, and amongst these was the Man’youshu, the “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves“. In the 8th century AD, in twenty volumes, a single compiler brought together more than 4,500 poems written by emperors, their sons, daughters and court gentry.

Apart from being the oldest known anthology of Japanese poetry, the Man’youshu gave it’s name to man’yougana, which in turn gave birth to the modern forms of kana we know today as hiragana and katakana.

Simplification sees the birth of syllabic siblings
The kana of Man’you was a complex mix of ideographic kanji, and kanji used for it’s phonetic qualities, and sometimes a combination of both. How the syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana came to be two different character sets for the same sounds has much to do with the way in which they were raised. Katakana was sent the to the monastery as a servant, and put to the task of simplifying the transcription of Buddhist sutras in shorthand.

Hiragana however was raised by women who had neither privilege nor education, but who showed a love of poetry. She began to reveal her form in such great works of literature as the Tale of Genji.

Hiragana comes of age in the Heian Period
The Heian period was a great flowering of culture for the Japanese people, and would sent the tone of civil life for the next millenia. It is in this period that we see the development of the modern Japanese lifestyle, artistic sentiment, and the rise of the military class.

Hiragana was initially shunned as being too feminine for any serious writing, but eventually she would come to be an acceptable way for men to write personal letters and poetry. Katakana on the other hand, found his way in to official life alongside Kanji, only recently being relegated to the inglorious duties of transliterating foreign words, animal names and onomatopoeia.

How hiragana represents the sounds of Japanese
Japanese was a spoken language long before kana were developed. When kana came onto the scene their sole purpose was to represent each sound speakers made, no more and no less. Each character is a phonetic symbol representing what linguists call a mora. You may be familiar with the 5-7-5 rule of haiku, and how difficult it is sometimes to count syllables in English to match the metre. In Japanese this is simplified by simply counting characters, or morae. It may even be safe to say that Japanese percieve words and their phonetic make up very differently.

Tsujima 1996, as quoted in Stalking the Wild Onji, an essay by Richard Gilbert

Why is this important? It might just be that the key to unlocking Japanese pronunciation is a very clear understanding of how these morae fit together as the fundamental building block of the spoken language.

How hiragana is used today
Hiragana is a flexible yet pragmatic component of written Japanese. In her guise as okurigana, she creates grammatical structure through providing particles and indicating conjugations to supplement the subject, object and verb. As a nurturer, she gives clues to the pronunciation of difficult or obscure kanji through furigana or rubi. She lowers the reading age of books aimed at children by standing in for kanji, or in other cases where kanji might be too formal for the purpose. Last but not least, she provides a feminine aesthetic and natural balance to prose and poetry.

Being able to read and write kanji may seem an insurmountable task to some, but conveying any sentence in written Japanese is possible with hiragana. Take out your brush pen, and get to know her form. I assure you won’t be disappointed.

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