If you were to ask someone to give an explanation of the Japanese language, it is more than likely this will be confined to its modern form, the Japanese we speak in the present day. The Japanese writing system, in particular, can be quite easily summarised. There are two forms of kana — hiragana and katakana — that are used to represent sounds. Katakana is used chiefly for foreign words, and hiragana chiefly for grammatical suffixes and for native words. On top of this, there are kanji, characters imported from China, which possess meaning in themselves and represent ideas. In modern Japanese, these three writing systems coexist to form a cohesive language. Unfortunately, any language has a history that covers thousands of years of time. And due to its oral nature as well as the fact that not every written source survived to this day, it is impossible to recreate an exact, direct timeline of a language’s genesis to now. However, over this series of articles, I will attempt to recreate a chronological journey of the written history of Japanese. I’ve based many of my observations on Nakami Yamaguchi’s fascinating book, A History of the Japanese Language ( nihongo no rekishi).