stylistic:tone
Japanese

In Japanese, Chinese characters are referred to as kanji. Beginning in the Nara period (710–794), readers and writers of kanbun —the Japanese term for Literary Chinese writing—began employing a system of reading techniques and annotations called kundoku. When reading, Japanese speakers would adapt the syntax and vocabulary of Literary Chinese texts to reflect their Japanese-language equivalents. Writing essentially involved the inverse of this process, and resulted in ordinary Literary Chinese. When adapted to write Japanese, characters were used to represent both Sino-Japanese vocabulary loaned from Chinese, as well as the corresponding native synonyms. Most kanji were subject to both borrowing processes, and as a result have both Sino-Japanese and native readings, known as on'yomi and kun'yomi respectively. Moreover, kanji may have multiple readings of either kind. Distinct classes of on'yomi were borrowed into Japanese at different points in time from different varieties of Chinese.

The Japanese writing system is a mixed script, and has also incorporated syllabaries called kana to represent phonetic units called moras, rather than morphemes. Prior to the Meiji era (1868–1912), writers used certain kanji to represent their sound values instead, in a system known as man'yōgana. Starting in the 9th century, specific man'yōgana were graphically simplified to create two distinct syllabaries called hiragana and katakana, which slowly replaced the earlier convention. Modern Japanese retains the use of kanji to represent most word stems, while kana syllabograms are generally used for grammatical affixes, particles, and loanwords. The forms of hiragana and katakana are visually distinct from one another, owing in large part to different methods of simplification: katakana were derived from smaller components of each man'yōgana, while hiragana were derived from the cursive forms of man'yōgana in their entirety. In addition, the hiragana and katakana for some moras were derived from different man'yōgana. Characters invented for Japanese-language use are called kokuji. The methods employed to create kokuji are equivalent to those used by Chinese-original characters, though most are ideographic compounds. For example, 峠 (tōge; 'mountain pass') is a compound kokuji composed of ⼭ 'MOUNTAIN', 上 'ABOVE', and 下 'BELOW'.

While characters used to write Chinese are monosyllabic, many kanji have multi-syllable readings. For example, the kanji 刀 has a native kun'yomi reading of katana. In different contexts, it can also be read with the on'yomi reading tō, such as in the Chinese loanword 日本刀 (nihontō; 'Japanese sword'), with a pronunciation corresponding to that in Chinese at the time of borrowing. Prior to the universal adoption of katakana, loanwords were typically written with unrelated kanji with on'yomi readings matching the syllables in the loanword. These spellings are called ateji: for example, 亜米利加 (Amerika) was the ateji spelling of 'America', now rendered as アメリカ. As opposed to man'yōgana used solely for their pronunciation, ateji still corresponded to specific Japanese words. Some are still in use: the official list of jōyō kanji includes 106 ateji readings.