Dateline: 06/23/97

The Japanese language consists of three kinds of writing (moji). The oldest writing system is the ideographic Chinese characters called Kanji. Kanji came into use in the 5th century for recording documents. Until the 5th century, Japan had no moji. The Japanese took the Chinese characters and devised their own way of reading them, and broke them down into the two phonetic writing systems: hiragana and katakana. It was during the Heian period (794-1185) that the phonetic moji came into effective use. Interestingly, the worlds oldest novel, "Genji Monogatari" (The Tale of Genji) was written by Murasaki Shikibu, using phonetic moji, during the Heian period. Hiragana, the less linear of the two phonetic writing systems is combined with Chinese characters (kanji) when composing general writing. Katakana is a sharp writing system that shares many of the same traits as hiragana, but is designed to express foreign words. It has an effect loosely comparable to italicized words in western writing. Romaji, though not a Japanese moji, is a Romanic writing system that is used to express Japanese words in a way that a westerner may pronounce them. 

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