The diaries and novels by court ladies were clear evidence of the existence of a true native Japanese culture. They had no clear prototypes in Chinese literature. Everything about them was distinctly Japanese. The transplanted Chinese civilization had flowered into a new culture, and the Japanese, a people but recently introduced to the art of writing, had produced a great literature of their own.
One may wonder why Japanese writing is still burdened with Chinese characters, if a thousand years ago the Japanese had already developed a phonetic script which was satisfactory for writing their language. The only explanation is the continued prestige of the Chinese language, and still more of the Chinese characters themselves. Learned writers inevitably tended to slip Chinese characters standing for individual uninflected words, such as nouns, into a Japanese text written in kana. From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on, this became standard procedure, and eventually it became customary to write as many uninflected words and the roots of as many inflected words as possible with characters, leaving for kana only the tag ends of words, such as inflections which could not be represented conveniently by characters.
The natural complexities of such a mixed system of writing were increased by two other factors. Since thousands of Chinese words were gradually incorporated into the Japanese language, most of the characters stood not only for the Japanese version of the original Chinese word, but also for the corresponding Japanese word. It is as if the Chinese character for “water,” 水, were to be used in English to represent