some of writing systems. Like the youth of China, the youth of Japan was sentenced generation after generation to years of mentally numbing memory work, simply in order to learn the rudiments of writing.
Because of the difficulties involved and also because of the tremendous prestige of all things Chinese, the ancient Japanese made little effort to write their own language. Proper names and brief poems in Japanese were spelled out laboriously with one Chinese character used phonetically for each syllable, but little else was attempted. Instead the Japanese wrote in pure and often reasonably good classical Chinese. Using Chinese much as medieval Europeans used Latin, they wrote their histories, geographies, law books, and official documents of all sorts. They even attempted to imitate Chinese literary forms, and men of education prided themselves on their ability to compose poems in Chinese.
The most interesting and significant form of literary endeavor at this time was history writing. This was to be expected in a cultural daughter of China, for the Chinese have always been historically minded, prone to take the historical approach to any subject or situation. The writing of history was always an important function of government in China, and as a result the Chinese were inveterate and extremely good historians.
Since Japan was in its own eyes an empire on the Chinese model, obviously she too needed an official history. Several early efforts to write one resulted in two extant works, the Nihon Shoki, a great official history compiled in 720, and a smaller work called the Kojiki,