Japanese Culture and Civilization Essay

Introduction

Irrespective of the nature or level of interaction between neighboring communities, it is ideally sufficient to cause a particular linguistic influence on each other. In most instances, the impact is felt profoundly in one direction. This denotes that the Chinese had a significant influence on Japanese during the ancient era. Whether written or spoken contemporary Japanese, it is difficult not to come across some borrowed words from the Chinese language. The process of loan words into the Japanese language is primarily attributed by the notion that Japanese has been extremely isolated. Japan’s international association with other nations have been limited hence the long history of borrowing. Therefore, a majority of Chinese people believe that Chinese has shaped the Japanese language for centuries, but has attained nothing in return. However, this work will seek to describe how the Japanese language has reinvented the Chinese language and extend our knowledge on how Japanese written language absorbed some Chinese language characteristics.

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The Reinvention of the Chinese Language

There is an outstanding history of cultural communication between Japan and China. Therefore, it is necessary to depict the significant influence of the Chinese language on Japan. It is critical to note that in ancient times China was in a dominant position in cultural exchange. It overwhelmingly influenced the Japanese literature, religion architecture among other fields. The Japanese writing is mainly made up of “Kanji”, “Hiragana” and “Katakana”. Kanji is understood as the Chinese characters. Notably, there is a substantive use of kanji in the Japanese writing system, and an extensive portion of its words is attained from Chinese.

On the other hand, “Hiragana” is derived from the cursive script method of Chinese calligraphy. Traditionally, in old Japan, Kanji was mainly applied by the elite or educated men while hiragana was initially used by court women when they were composing the personal communications and literature. “Katakana” is attained from one section of the Chinese character. These instances demonstrate how the Chinese culture has played a significant role in developing the Japanese language.

However, the cultural communication is a two-way process because the Chinese language was also influenced by the Japanese language which lead to its reinvention to accommodate the differences from the Japanese. This is because the Chinese and Japanese writing system had a lot of similarities due to the cultural diffusion between the two groups. In the 20th Century, the Communist Party of China had reinvented traditional characters extensively by simplifying it so that they can enhance literacy. Notably, the traditional characters are reported to be used in some areas such as Hong Kong and Taiwan. Its outlook can differentiate simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese since the abridged version has fewer strokes and easier to write. On the other hand, the Japanese writing system appears to maintain the simplified Chinese syntax and at the same time applying the character combinations particularly to Japanese for their semantic content.

In comparison with the Japanese Writing system, the modern Chinese language was reinvented by borrowing some concepts or aspects from the West, for instance, the Roman letters, Western punctuation, and Arabic numerals. Moreover, the Chinese developed their pronunciation system which is commonly referred to as bo, po, mo, and fo or pinyin. It is necessary to point out that the pinyin system was established in the early 20th century and it is extensively applied in China. Nonetheless, the pinyin system was also acknowledged for its simplicity hence making the Chinese pronunciation easier to relate from western or English language speakers. The writing system of Japanese is probably one of the most known aspects of language due to its complexity in nature. The Japanese language is comprised of a liberal mixture of separate systems such as the kanji, kana, katakana and Hiragana. However, after the simplification of the Chinese language, the Japanese writing system involved the use of classical Chinese grammar and chine characters as it is evidenced in the 8th Century Kojiki. Thus, the reinvention of the Chinese dialect saw the Japanese writing use the Chinese characters, kanji and hiragana for content words and grammatical function.

Characters are the fundamental aspects of the written Chinese system which has several syllables that have similar sounds hence making it easier for the Chinese speaker to converse with each other. Traditionally, the Chinese speaker is most likely to analyze and interpret their language based on the strokes of the characters. Thus, the reinvention involved the inclusion of multiple monosyllabic words that are in Chinese. This implies that a single character in a Chinese dialogue can both have their own particular meaning while others opt to use two or more monosyllables generate an extensive vocabulary base. Therefore, the reinvented Chinese language did not only accommodate the Japanese differences, but it also unified China.

Japanese Written-Language Loan Chinese Language Characteristics

It is essential to understand the Japanese language itself and what caused Japan to borrow or use Chinese language characteristics. The prolonged isolation of Japan which was viewed as an island state implies that it was hard for linguistics to acquire viable evidence of the origins of the Japanese language. For instance, in most European languages, language mixture was believed to be unavoidable due to the ease of migration along the universe. The isolation of Japan implied that there was an extreme limitation in Language Corporation as well as other elements such as social and scientific progress. Therefore, the Chinese scholars travelled to Japan which lead the Japanese to adopt the Chinese language characteristics particularly the writing system of kanji (漢字) since they did not have a writing system of its own.

The adoption of the Chinese language characteristics was impeccable since the vocabulary invented alongside with the kanji has been entirely accepted by the Japanese dictionary. The Japanese words are pronounced in reference to the “Onyomi” (⾳読み, lit. “Sound reading“) which can be understood as the reading of Kanji. This means that Onyomi is the sound attained from the original Chinese pronunciation. Subsequently, different characters have several on-readings since they have been reintroduced several times to accommodate the Japanese differences. As a consequence, nearly every Chinese loan words are drafted in a different script also known as the katakana. “Katakana” can be understood as the angular script which is easily differentiated from the rounded text that is traditionally used for the native Japanese writing system. Thus, Katakana makes it easier to transliterate Chinese words into Japanese hence the prominence of Chinese language characteristics in Japanese culture.

Consequently, in the present Japanese language, the Chinese characters also termed as kanji are used to compose adjectives, nouns and verbs. In that, they are used as links to connect Japanese phrases. Moreover, the Hiragana is used as a grammatical device for making the system useful while katakana is used as a tool for recording the foreign words that are found in the Japanese dictionary. It is now evident that the Japanese language utilized some Chinese characters to develop their writing system.

Conclusion

Conclusively, globalization has played a critical role in the civilization of countries across the planet. The Chinese and Japanese writings systems and their traditions have several things in common. For instance, kanji which is now extensively used in the Japanese writing system. It is evident that borrowed words from the Chinese language have had a significant effect on the Japanese language after their first interaction. With the advent of the Chinese characters several words, names, concepts and meanings were adopted by the Japanese. The Japanese have accommodated Chinese characters to their language for phonetic characters and standardizing their language. Thus, this work has successfully explored the evolution of the Japanese language through the loan words which ultimately lead to the reinvention of the Chinese dialect.