The Sexist History Behind the Development of Hiragana
And how women were responsible for writing the first great Japanese texts
Hiragana is one of the three main ‘alphabets’ used in the Japanese writing system, along with katakana and kanji (Chinese characters). Its role is to indicate the pronunciation of kanji and is used as the basis of the Japanese writing system, verb endings, particles and much more.
The natural development of an alphabet or any other system of writing is something that is continuously developing and when looked at through decades and centuries we become better equipped to understand the patterns of these changes.
Changes may seem instant — but even now there seems to be a slow process of developing a system of characters that represent emotions and pictures and is wildly used in our day to day lives — emoji. 絵文字(pronounced emoji) or picture characters is now recognized by dictionaries and major figures in linguistics, so much so that the laugh with tearing eyes emoji was the Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2015.
The adoption of kanji and man’yōgana
It was through the Korean peninsula and by Korean scholars, that kanji found its home in Japan, or so the story is told in the Kojiki — considered to be the…
