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INTRODUCTION TO
KANJI CALLIGRAPHY
The word calligraphy literally means “beautiful writing” and is an art form that has been used by nearly every civilization whose language had a written script to stress the importance of its culture, religion, and philosophy.
As calligraphy became widespread, it began to be used more for purely artistic expression. In Asian art, calligraphic poety is often accompanied with illustrations of landscapes, decorative plants, or other natural beauty.
WHAT IS KANJI?
The word “kanji” is a Japanese word that refers to a group of thousands of symbols that are used in Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian languages.
Kanji characters are sometimes called pictograms, or a number of similar terms, because many of the oldest known kanji characters graphically depicted the object or idea that they represented.
As more characters were developed, it became increasingly difficult to ‘draw a picture’ that represented the complex ideas of each new character. So, even though the idea that kanji are pictograms may be true for many of them, it is, by far, not an accurate description of the majority of characters in use today.
Since the 2nd century, Chinese kanji scholars have used six categories to classify kanji characters according to their make-up:
• Pictographs, or “shoukeimoji ” (象形文字 ), are rough sketches of the object they represent, such ‘eye’ in the graphic shown.
• Ideographs, or “shijimoji ” (指事文字 ), represent abstract concepts like numbers or directions, such as up (上 ), down (下 ), two (二 ), and three (三 ).
• Compound ideographs, or “kaiimoji ” (会意文字 ), are generally a combination of two or more pictographs that represent a complex idea or relationship, such as ‘east’ in the graphic on the right.
• The phonetic-ideographic, or “keiseimoji ” (形声文 字 ), account for about 85% of all kanji and are made of two main parts. Originally, one part indicated the meaning, and the other, the Chinese pronunciation. Though this type may or may not provide a hint about their pronunciation in Japanese, in most cases, you can’t guess their meaning.
• Derivative characters, or “tenchuumoji ” (転注文字 ), are characters whose meaning was derived from characters of a completely different meaning.
• And last, phonetic loan characters, or “kashamoji ” (仮借文字 ), are kanji whose meaning is ignored, but borrowed for their sound alone. In kashamoji, America is sometimes written (亜米利加 ), “Amerika”. This usage is like writing “UR2” in place of ‘you are, too’.
THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF KANJI
The origin of kanji can be traced back to the earliest known civilizations of China. Though little information that all historians agree upon exists, many legends exist about its inception.
Though scholars disagree, the popular myth is that the first kanji were invented by a Chinese scribe by the name of Ts’ang Chie who began to develop them after studying the foot prints of various birds and animals in the royal gardens.
Bone and tortoise shell carvings that were used for fortune telling show the use of kanji in ancient China as far back as about 1,500 B.C.E. And by the turn of the millennium, kanji was a fully established writing medium.
Around the fifth century, Buddhism spread to Japan, bringing kanji with it. At that time, the Japanese had no writing system and the common class of people didn’t have the education needed to read the thousand of characters.
At first, they adopted of a very small set of Chinese kanji whose sounds could be used to express the spoken Japanese language. A collection of popular Japanese poems was rendered in these characters which resulted in their widespread acceptance and use.
This set, eventually called manyogana, generally had their Chinese meaning ignored and were used to represent the sounds of Japanese only. Simplification of the characters resulted in two writing styles, hiragana and katakana.
Scholars, considering kana to be inferior, continued to work on devising methods to read “kanbun”, or Chinese literature, using rules to alter the word order and pronouncing the words using Japanese sounds. This resulted the adoption of many new Chinese words and concepts, and also, the sounds of onyomi pronunciation. But to adopt kanji in a way that would result in true Japanese kanji, the characters had to be paired with preexisting Japanese words based on their meaning. And this linked the kunyomi sounds to kanji pronunciation. Both of these methods will be discussed later in the book.
Meanwhile, kana had been on its way to becoming the mainstream writing system of the common people, and by the eighth century, it was in widespread use.
Eventually, all three of these scripts settled into the specific roles they play in the Japanese writing system of today.
STYLES OF KANJI
There are six main styles of written kanji and each has its own characteristic appearance and historic usage. Of these, only three pertain to modern Japanese calligraphy.
Kaisho
Kaisho is a plain style that is the easiest to read. It is also used by those first learning to write kanji. Its simplicity allows students to clearly see all of the brush strokes of each character. Kaisho is the style that is the closest to the modern printed fonts of today, and is the style taught in this book.
Gyousho
Gyousho is a semi-cursive style that is akin to the English cursive handwriting that people use after they become proficient at writing the characters. It sometimes blends strokes into a cluster and may slightly simplify some complex structures.
Sousho
Sousho, or “grass script”, is a fully cursive style of writing that uses flowing lines to merge many of the brush strokes together. Even though some of the characters are recognizable to the average reader, most people cannot accurately read sousho script because so many of the characters are modified to the extent that the resemblance is not always apparent.
Naturally, all of the major styles originated in China, and some are still used for purposes other than calligraphy in Japan today.
Such a style is the seal script, or “reisho”, which was originally used on the name