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context: calligraphy > origins
Kanji & Kana
The Chinese ideograms are known as Kanji, and are retained for a small number of words - Japanese schoolchildren are now required to know nearly 2,000 characters, and educated adults will generally know twice as many. However, from the 9th Century the Japanese invented their own scripts - I've seen various people tentatively credited with this, but the exact origin is not clear. These scripts are syllabic, one symbol representing a sound rather than a meaning. They started as greatly simplified versions of Chinese ideograms representing words with more or less the right sound. These two newer scripts are known as kana. Initially, katakana, the more angular form, was used by men for religious and official documents, while women used hiragana, a more cursive, flowing form. Nowadays, katakana is used only for foreign words and in science, and hiragana dominates. Official signs in kanji are accompanied by hiragana translations, for the large number who wouldn't be able to read them otherwise.