cate the early development of a happy combination of artistic taste and superb craftsmanship which ever since has characterized the Japanese.
In art, the Japanese could have had no better teachers than the Chinese, but in the field of writing Chinese influence was less happy. Japanese is a language of simple phonetic structure and highly inflected words. Hence it can be easily written by phonetic symbols, and these are necessary to represent the language properly. The Chinese writing system, on the other hand, leaves little possibility for phonetic transcription or for the representation of inflections. Since Chinese lacks inflection and since in ancient Chinese the words tended to be monosyllabic, the Chinese found it possible to use a writing system in which each monosyllabic word or word-root is represented by a special symbol, called a character or ideograph. These characters range from a simple line, 一 to represent “one,” to more complex characters, such as the monstrosity in twenty-five strokes 灣 representing the word “bay.”
The Chinese student has always been faced with the grim necessity of mastering several thousand of these characters before he could be considered literate. The ancient Japanese were faced with this and with the added difficulty that the Chinese writing system was not suitable to the writing of Japanese. Had Japan been the neighbor of some Western country using a phonetic script, such as our own alphabet, the Japanese would have quickly learned to write their native tongue with efficiency and ease. Unfortunately geographic accident decreed otherwise, and the Japanese were burdened with the crushing weight of the most cumber-