primitive people, overawed by the vastly superior continental civilization and eager to imitate blindly anything Chinese. Japan was reaching a state of intellectual maturity and was ready to develop a culture of its own.
One sign of the changing attitude in Japan was the ending of official contacts with China. The last of the great embassies left Japan for T’ang in 838 and returned the next year. Later embassies were proposed but were argued down by courtiers who felt their value no longer warranted the decided risks of the trip across the East China Sea. Some private traders and student monks continued to travel between the two lands, but for the most part Japan lapsed into its earlier state of virtual isolation from the continent, and this isolation in turn made the Japanizing of imported Chinese civilization all the more inevitable and rapid.
The slow rise of native Japanese culture is perhaps best observed in the development of an adequate means of writing the native tongue. This writing system was developed slowly during the ninth and tenth centuries by the process of using certain Chinese characters in greatly abbreviated form as simple phonetic symbols devoid of any specific meaning in themselves. Since the Chinese characters each represented one monosyllabic word or word-root, the phonetic symbols derived from them normally stood for a whole syllable, such as ka, se, or mo. The result was a syllabary and not an alphabet, such as our own system of writing.
The Japanese syllabary, or kana as it is called, was at first a confused affair. For one thing, the Chinese characters used were abbreviated in two different ways. In one system, called hiragana, the whole char-