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Japan Past and Present

acter was written in a very stylized or cursive form. Thus, the Chinese character meaning “slave” became the hiragana symbol standing for the sound nu. In the other system, called katakana, some element of the character was chosen to represent the phonetic value of the whole. Thus, this same Chinese character for “slave” became the katakana symbol also standing for nu. Another complexity was that the choice of characters for abbreviation as kana was at first quite haphazard, and usually several were used for any one syllable. In fact, both hiragana and katakana have only been standardized in recent decades, and variant kana forms are still commonly used in every day correspondence.

The Japanese syllabaries formed more clumsy systems of writing than alphabets, but they were, nevertheless, reasonably efficient systems for writing Japanese, and with their development appeared a growing literature in the native tongue. As stated previously, poems had been composed in Japanese even at the height of the Chinese period, and had been laboriously written down by the use of unabbreviated Chinese characters to represent each syllable phonetically; but these poems were usually extremely brief, following a strict pattern of thirty-one syllables, merely enough to suggest a scene or an emotion. The classical Japanese poem was delicate and beautiful within its narrow bounds, but it was distinctly limited as a literary form.

The kana syllabaries made possible more extensive literary work in Japanese, and in the tenth century stories, travel diaries, and essays appeared, written in Japanese which sometimes achieved considerable liter-