What Is Man’yōgana, and What Was It Used For?

When you learn hiragana and katakana, it is easy to picture Japanese writing as if it had always consisted of three neatly separate systems. Kanji represent words and meanings, while kana help write down pronunciation. In reality, it took a long road to arrive at today’s system.

One important stage on that road was man’yōgana (万葉仮名, まんようがな; also romanized as manyougana): a way of writing in which characters of Chinese origin were used to record Japanese sounds. Once you understand it, it also becomes clearer how hiragana and katakana could emerge from kanji.

Man’yōgana was not a unified, fixed set of symbols like today’s kana chart. The term refers to the phonetic use of kanji: in a given spot, a character was chosen mainly for its reading, not for its meaning.

This is an important distinction. The same kanji could carry meaning in one context and act as a sound sign in another. In early Japanese texts, writing by meaning and writing by sound could even be mixed.

The spread of Chinese writing in Japan made it possible for a written culture to develop. Yet Chinese and Japanese differ greatly in structure.

To write down Japanese words, names, grammatical elements and poems, solutions were needed that recorded not only meaning but also the Japanese sound shape. One such solution was using the readings of kanji to represent sounds.

So it was not a matter of adding small signs to show how a kanji is pronounced, as furigana does today. The full kanji themselves worked as sound signs.

As an illustration, look at this sequence:

• 加 → ka
• 奈 → na
• 加奈 → ka-na

Placing the two characters side by side in their phonetic use gives us the sound sequence ka-na. Here we should not start from adding up the meanings of the two kanji, but from the sounds they stand for.

This is a teaching illustration, not a quotation from a specific historical text.

The real system was more varied: several different characters could be used for the same sound value. What is more, historical readings do not always map simply onto modern Japanese pronunciation.

The name man’yōgana is linked to the Man’yōshū (万葉集), the outstanding anthology of 8th-century Japanese poetry. It is one of the best-known records of kanji used for sound.

It is important to note, however, that the practice did not occur only in this anthology, and not every character in it is purely a sound sign. Writing at the time combined several methods.

Man’yōgana made it possible to write down passages in Japanese, poems, names and other linguistic elements. It also appears in private written records.

It is especially valuable to historical linguists because the choice of characters also reveals something about the sound system of early Japanese. Writing at the time distinguished certain sounds that have since merged. That is why man’yōgana is not just a curiosity of writing history but also an important source for research on Old Japanese.

The cursive, flowing handwritten forms of kanji used for sound played an important role in the emergence of hiragana. The handwritten shapes of complex characters gradually simplified and became independent kana forms.

For example, today’s あ can be traced back to 安, and か to 加.

This was not a one-step transformation, nor the invention of a single person. The road to today’s set of characters led through many variant forms and a long development.

Katakana is the result of a different kind of simplification: many of its signs were created by taking just one part of a kanji used for sound.

Its development was closely tied to reading and annotating Chinese texts, as well as to Buddhist studies. Shorter signs were easier to jot beside or between the lines of a text.

The connection is well illustrated by the formal link between 加 and カ, and between 阿 and ア. These are relationships of origin, not always “conversions” that can be carried out in a single stroke.

Hiragana and katakana therefore share a related background in writing history, but developed through different processes.

To learn modern Japanese, you don’t need to memorize a complete list of man’yōgana. As a beginner, what matters is mastering hiragana, katakana and common kanji.

Knowing where they came from, however, can help Japanese writing feel less like three unrelated systems. Behind the shapes of kana lie a history and recognizable connections.

Man’yōgana shows how borrowed Chinese writing adapted to the Japanese language. Kanji could serve not only as signs carrying meaning but also as a way to write down sounds — and this tradition helped give rise to the kana we learn today.