Japanese culture: three scripts, two religions and a state that lists its own crafts

Why one sentence needs three scripts

Japanese is written with kanji, logographic characters adopted from Chinese, and with kana, two phonographic syllabaries that developed out of cursive forms and components of those same characters. All three appear together, and each does a different job.

Hiragana carries native and naturalised Japanese words and, critically, the grammatical elements that Chinese characters cannot express: verb endings, particles, the machinery of the sentence. Katakana handles what is marked as foreign or otherwise set apart. Kanji carries the semantic weight, and there are several thousand in regular use, including a set of characters invented in Japan rather than borrowed, known as kokuji.

Each kana syllabary holds 46 basic characters, or 71 counting diacritics, and each corresponds to one sound, so the phonetic system is exact. Kanji are the opposite. Most have more than one reading, broadly split into on'yomi, which approximate the Chinese pronunciation at the time the character was adopted, and kun'yomi, which are native Japanese words matched to the character's meaning. Which reading applies depends on context, and some common characters have many.

The writing system also encodes distinctions the spoken language does not. The verb naosu, to fix or to cure, is written 治す when curing a person and 直す when repairing an object. A reader sees which is meant; a listener does not.

This is why Japanese literacy takes so long to acquire and why the Edo achievement of roughly 30% literacy is a more impressive figure than the same percentage would be elsewhere.

How two religions occupy the same ground

Shinto is polytheistic and animistic, organised around the kami, entities understood to inhabit all things including natural forces and particular places in the landscape. They are venerated at household shrines, at family shrines, and at around 100,000 public shrines staffed by priests who make offerings of food and drink.

Kami veneration has been traced to the Yayoi period, from 300 BCE to 250 CE. Buddhism arrived at the end of the Kofun period, between 300 and 538 CE, and spread quickly. What happened next was not competition. Under shinbutsu-shūgō, kami worship and Buddhism became functionally inseparable, and remained so for more than a thousand years.

Shinto is numerically Japan's largest religion and Buddhism the second, and most of the population takes part in both, particularly at festivals. That reflects a general view in Japanese culture that the beliefs and practices of different traditions need not exclude one another, and the same instinct produced a writing system that kept all three of its scripts in service.

Scholars disagree about when it becomes legitimate to speak of Shinto as a distinct religion at all, partly because it has no codified doctrine. One workable definition is simply belief in kami.

What the state decided to protect

Japan's approach to its own heritage is unusually institutional, and the categories it uses are the interesting part.

The Act on the Protection of Cultural Properties creates a national register administered by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, which designates buildings, artworks, historic sites, and also intangible cultural properties, meaning practices and skills rather than objects.

A 1975 amendment added Selected Conservation Techniques, under which the responsible minister designates traditional techniques and skills judged essential to conserving cultural properties. The state then documents them, trains successors, and funds the conservators and preservation groups who carry them. This is a country that treats the ability to repair a temple roof as a heritage asset in its own right, distinct from the temple.

The international register runs alongside it. Japan has inscribed a long list on the UNESCO representative list of intangible cultural heritage, and reading it is a compact description of what the country values.

The range is the point. A theatre form, a way of eating, a method of making cloth and a village ritual sit on the same list under the same protection, because the category is practice rather than art.

What the language itself is doing

Japanese belongs to the Japonic family alongside the Ryukyuan languages and the variously classified Hachijō, and attempts to link that family to Ainu, Austronesian, Koreanic or the discredited Altaic grouping have never found wide acceptance. The language is, for practical purposes, related to nothing outside its own islands.

Its ancestor, Proto-Japonic, is thought to have been brought from the Korean peninsula around the early to mid fourth century BCE, in the Yayoi period, replacing the languages of the earlier Jōmon inhabitants including the ancestor of modern Ainu.

Structurally it works in ways that European languages do not. Japanese is agglutinative and mora-timed, with a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch accent, which means pitch distinguishes words rather than merely conveying emphasis. Word order is normally subject, object, verb, with particles marking each word's grammatical function, and the underlying organisation is topic and comment rather than subject and predicate. Sentence-final particles carry emotional and emphatic force that other languages put into intonation.

Vocabulary arrived in layers. Extensive Sino-Japanese vocabulary entered from the Heian period, altering the sound system of the language as it came, and European loanwords have flowed in continuously since the end of isolation in 1853. The result is a lexicon with distinct native, Chinese-derived and Western strata that a speaker chooses between for register, in much the way English chooses between Germanic and Latinate words.

Japanese has no official status in Japan, and is the de facto national language. The standard form, hyōjungo or kyōtsūgo, descends from the speech of the Kyoto elite rather than from the dialect of Edo, even though the capital moved there.

Dialects differ in pitch accent, inflection, vocabulary and particle use, and sometimes in their vowel and consonant inventories. A 1967 survey of students from greater Tokyo found the least intelligible to them were the Kiso dialect of the Nagano mountains, Himi in Toyama, Kagoshima, and Maniwa in Okayama, and that is before counting the Ryukyuan languages, which are separate languages rather than dialects at all.

Why the food got listed

Washoku is inscribed by UNESCO as a traditional dietary culture, and the wording of that category was chosen deliberately over the simpler word cuisine.

What is protected is a set of practices: the relationship between what is eaten and the season, the connection to particular occasions in the year, the sourcing of ingredients, the forms of preparation and presentation, and the social role of shared meals. Under that framing the heritage item is the annual cycle of eating, and a recipe is only one artefact produced by it.

That approach is consistent with the rest of the cultural properties system described above, which protects the conservation technique alongside the building it conserves. In both cases the state has decided that the transmissible skill matters more than the artefact, because the artefact can be recorded and the skill cannot.

Where the classical forms came from

The theatre traditions on that list were produced by three different social orders and they still show it.

Nōgaku is the oldest, masked, slow, and austere, developed under warrior patronage. Kabuki and bunraku came out of the Edo period and its merchant audiences, and belong to the same commercial culture that produced woodblock prints and popular fiction. Gagaku is older than either and belongs to the imperial court, which is why it survived: it was maintained as ceremonial rather than performed for a paying public.

Kumiodori is the outlier and the most revealing. It is Okinawan, developed in the Ryukyu Kingdom, which was an independent state until Satsuma invaded in 1609 and was not formally annexed until the nineteenth century. Its presence on the same list as gagaku is an acknowledgement that Japanese culture includes traditions that were not Japanese when they were made.

The same applies to Ainu dance, from the indigenous people of Hokkaido and the north, whose language and practices are not Japanese in origin at all.

What Edo left behind

The two centuries of near-total isolation under the Tokugawa produced the culture most people picture when they picture Japan.

Merchant wealth with nowhere political to go went into entertainment and art, and the resulting urban culture named itself the ukiyo, the floating world. It produced ukiyo-e woodblock prints, which developed from single-colour images into sophisticated multi-colour printing; ukiyo-zōshi popular novels; kabuki and bunraku theatre; the shamisen, imported around 1600, as the instrument of all of it; geisha as a new profession of entertainers who conversed, sang and danced; and haiku, whose acknowledged master is Matsuo Bashō, 1644 to 1694.

Underneath sat the Neo-Confucian order the shogunate sponsored, dividing society into four classes by occupation, with the samurai claiming the code of bushidō, the way of the warrior. That is the tension of the period in one sentence: an official ideology of austere hierarchy and a commercial culture of pleasure, running simultaneously in the same cities, and it is the commercial one that the world remembers.

High literacy is what made it viable. A publishing industry producing hundreds of titles a year requires a reading public, and Edo Japan had one.

Why the exports came later

Japan's cultural presence abroad is a postwar development and it happened by an unusual route.

The period immediately after the occupation was a golden age for Japanese cinema, helped by the abolition of government censorship, low production costs, new techniques and large domestic audiences at a time when other entertainment was scarce. Novelists including Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima found readers in America and Europe.

What followed was broader and less official. Kaiju monster films, anime, manga, video games and martial arts moved outward through returning American soldiers and successive generations of troops stationed in Japan, and then through young audiences who found them on their own. Through the 1990s and 2000s, while the economy stagnated, Japanese popular culture expanded worldwide.

That sequence is worth noting precisely. The cultural export boom coincided with the lost decades, not with the growth years, and it was not a state project. The government began treating it as an asset well after the audience had already assembled.

What holds it together

The pattern from the writing system runs through everything above.

Japan does not generally replace what it has when it adopts something new. It adds the new thing alongside and assigns each a domain: Chinese characters and two native syllabaries, kami and buddhas, court music and merchant theatre, a Neo-Confucian class order and a floating world, a heritage register that protects both the building and the technique for repairing it.

What that produces is a culture with an unusual amount of surviving material and an unusual tolerance for holding contradictory things without resolving them. It also produces the specific difficulty a visitor runs into, which is that almost nothing here has been simplified for the convenience of the person encountering it.