Nihon no Alphabet -- The Japanese Alphabets

Japanese has overall 4 writing systems ranging in creation from the 6th century to around 1945. These are, in order of creation, Kanji, Katakana, Hiragana, and Romanji.

Kanji

During the 6th century, Chinese culture entered Japan, which included government, art, business, religion, and also the writing system. For the first time, the Japanese were able to write. Much of Chinese was added to the Japanese vocabulary and even now 40% of the modern Japanese vocabulary is from changed Chinese words.
Even though the Chinese spoken language worked when the Japanese changed them slightly to fit their vowel system, the writing system was too different to keep. The structure was much too foreign so in order for the Japanese to be able to write freely they took the Chinese symbols and used their own words in their place. Within a hundred years the Chinese characters were then changed into Japanese kanji.
Here are is the word Reiki which means the source of the spirit. These are both the same word with the same Kanji. The only difference is Cursive versus Priting.


Katakana

Katakana was created by Buddhist priests in order to make a phonetic shorthand system. Phonetic is what the English alphabet is, instead of a symbol meaning a word, letters, in this case a consonants and a vowel makes the letter.
Katakana now is mainly for borrowed words from other countries, onomatopoeias, and for some plants and animals. Words such as sandoichi for sandwich and Koka-kora for Coca-Cola became part of the language. Along with many English words are German words such as Arubaito for Arbait (part time job). These adapted words have helped shape what the Japanese language is today.

Katakana is also used for foreign names for example
Sara

John

Shannon

Timothy

Christina

Jordan

Hiragana

One hundred years after the creation of Katakana, high ranking women created another alphabet, mostly the same a Katakana but with little differences. This writing system, Hiragana, was created for poetry, novels, and diaries. Hiragana is used now as the main alphabet with the mixture of Kanji. Here is a page from an old samurai poetry collection from hundreds of years ago.


Romanji

That is only 3 writing systems that Japanese has, the other one is the most recent which is Romanji (Romanized words). After World War II, Americans were still in Japan and they found the language to be quite difficult and even attempted to remove kanji from the language. This never happened but it did reduce the amount of everyday kanji used in the Japanese language to around 1,850 where there are over 50,000 Kanji. After changing again, today there are just under 2,000 that are regularly used. But with this reduction in kanji and hiragana used more, the 4th writing system was created. Using the Roman alphabet, the writing system was changed so now words like Konnichiwa and Arigato were readable to those who did not read the language. Here is a sign in Japan which has Hiragana, Kanji, and Romanji.