Sumiko Knudsen - Japanese Calligraphy: Shodo

(Kaizen) development

Shodo is composed of the words "Sho" which means writing, and "Do", which means path or way.

In Japanese, Calligraphy is called Shodo. Japanese Calligraphy, Shodo, is a specialized art of writing Japanese characters using a brush and black ink. It has causes some similarities with Western Calligraphy, but Shodo is considered more of an art form. This is because each character has a special meaning and because of the wide range of available characters. In the Western calligraphy you have 26 characters (English), in Japanese calligraphy there are about 48,000 characters that you can use.

Japanese Calligraphy reflects the soul and mind where one uses a simple brush stroke to express ones thoughts, mind and feelings.

Kaisho

Kaisho literally means "writing correctly". In other words, this is a style where each brush stroke is created in a conscious and clear way, to create a shape that is very similar to the printed version of the characters, as you can see in a newspaper.

Gyosho

Gyosho literally means "floating and artistic" and refers to the semi-italic style of Japanese calligraphy. Like handwriting in English, this is the style that most people usually will use to write when taking notes.

Hiragana

Chinese and Japanese are fundamentally different in language structure, and the Japanese therefore had many problems in taking over the Chinese writing. Japanese has unlike Chinese for example to distinguish between them, one had to develop a phonetic alphabet in support of the borrowed Kanji (Chinese characters). Hiragana indeholder 46 forskellige stavelser. In the Heian period, the syllable was used mainly by women while men wrote in Chinese.

Katakana

By the side of Hiragana, in the Buddhist temples, another phonetic script was developed namely Katakana. It was used by the monks to record the pronunciation. In principle, Katakana completely overlaps with Hiragana, as it has characters for the same 46 syllables, but in modern Japanese it is only used to write foreign loan words and foreign names.

(Kizuna) connection

Kanji (Japanese character)

Kanji is one of three Japanese writing systems together with Hiragana and Katakana. Both Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic, which means that each character represents a single syllable, and the sign will never be pronounced in any other way.

2. Kanji History

Oracle bone inscriptions

Kanji is a system of symbols that represent words or ideas and it may have different meanings and pronunciation depending on the context.

Kanji is believed to originate in China, although it is not certain exactly where they were first written. Some believe that the first writings appeared in 4500 BC, and the oldest known modern Kanji date back to 1600 BC. The original kanji are pictograms, that is, they express an idea through an image. Over time, these representations developed into the signs that are written today. In many kanji you can still see the original picture quite easily, others, not so much.

While Kanji existed in China for many centuries, they did not reach Japan before 57 AD and were not taken in Japanese until the early 5th century AD. At the time when Kanji came to Japan, the Japanese did not have their own written language. Everything was written and read in Chinese. In the 8th century AD the Japanese began to annotate the Chinese characters to mark pronunciation and change them to make sense of existing Japanese grammar.

Old Chinese hieroglyphic signs left on bones and turtle marks

3. The Japanese Writing System

Ono no Michikaze about 927

The Japanese writing system is an interesting mix of innovation and tradition. It combines a set of Chinese "logograms" * and two Japanese derived syllabuses in a complex logo syllabic system.

Writing came to Japan from China in the 5th century. The first Japanese texts were written with Chinese characters (Kanji), a system called Kanbun (which simply means "Chinese writing"). However, writing in Chinese was very awkward as the grammatical syntax of the Japanese language is significantly different from Chinese. The solution to this problem is to keep the Chinese characters but use Japanese grammar.

The next problem is that Chinese is an insulating language, which led to a writing system where each character represented a syllable. The Japanese language, on the other hand, has inflected verbs and adjectives. So, to represent them, the Japanese writers used certain Chinese characters for their sound value. This means that the system was ambiguous as it was difficult to know whether a character should be interpreted as a logogram or a phonetic character.