Kanji
Kanji (漢字) are logographic characters (based on the traditional ones) taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese.
It is known from

Traditionally, Japanese is written in a format called tategaki (縦書き), which was inherited from traditional Chinese practice. In this format, the characters are written in columns going from top to bottom, with columns ordered from right to left. After reaching the bottom of

Importation of kanji
Japan's first encounters with Chinese characters may have come as early as the 1st century AD with the King of Na gold seal, said

• Gottlieb, Nanette (1996). Kanji Politics: Language Policy and Japanese Script. Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7103-0512-5.
• Habein, Yaeko Sato (1984). The History of the Japanese Written

Collation (word ordering) in Japanese is based on the kana, which express the pronunciation of the words, rather than the kanji. The kana may be ordered using two common orderings, the prevalent gojūon (fifty-sound) ordering, or the old-fashioned iroha

Japanese is normally written without spaces between words, and text is allowed to wrap from one line to the next without regard for word boundaries. This convention was originally

There are a number of methods of rendering Japanese in Roman letters. The Hepburn method of romanization, designed for English speakers, is a de facto standard widely used inside and