*Hi, and welcome to the shop! How’s your Japanese Kanji these days? Japanese Kanji are more popular than ever all over the world, and the Japanese Kanji T-shirt Shop is dedicated to displaying the beautiful Japanese kanji calligraphy writing style.

When finished, I will have about 50 different Kanji symbols for words and proverbs, each on several different t-shirt designs, available to you. Kanj tees are always in style, and make wonderful personal gifts for friends and family. Please have a look around. I am sure you will find a Kanji design that’s right for you. Now, how about a little Japanese Kanji trivia?*

Kanji are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with hiragana (ひらがな, 平仮名), katakana (カタカナ, 片仮名), and Arabic numerals. The Japanese term kanji (漢字) literally means “Han characters”.

Chinese characters first came to Japan on articles imported from China. An early instance of such an import was a gold seal given by the emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty in 57 AD¹. It is not clear when Japanese people started to gain a command of Classical Chinese by themselves. The first Japanese documents were probably written by Chinese immigrants.

The Japanese language itself had no written form at the time kanji were introduced.[citation needed] Originally texts were written in the Chinese language and would have been read as such. Over time, however, a system known as kanbun (漢文) emerged.

Chinese characters also came to be used to write Japanese words, resulting in the modern kana syllabaries. A writing system called man’yōgana (used in the ancient poetry anthology Man’yōshū) evolved that used a limited set of Chinese characters for their sound, rather than for their meaning. Man’yōgana written in cursive style became hiragana, a writing system that was accessible to women (who were denied higher education).

Major works of Heian era literature by women were written in hiragana. Katakana emerged via a parallel path: monastery students simplified man’yōgana to a single constituent element. Thus the two other writing systems, hiragana and katakana, referred to collectively as kana, are actually descended from kanji.

In modern Japanese, kanji are used to write parts of the language such as nouns, adjective stems and verb stems, while hiragana are used to write inflected verb and adjective endings (okurigana), particles, native Japanese words, and words where the kanji is too difficult to read or remember. Katakana is used for representing onomatopoeia, non-Japanese loanwords, certain naming, and for emphasis on certain words.

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