Where Kanji Come From — The World of Pictographs

Kanji began as pictographs — visible forms traced in line. In fact, not only kanji: the scripts of many ancient civilisations were born from drawing the things around us, the heavens, all of creation, as pictures.

Sun, moon, mountain, river — a form made of lines

To be pictographic is to trace a shape — not as a sketch, but as a few decisive lines that capture the essence:

• Sun: a circle with a single dot-stroke inside.
• Moon: drawn as a waxing crescent, to tell it from the sun.
• River: three S-curves — a great flow with smaller ones beside it.
• Mountain: a distant ridge of higher and lower peaks.

A familiar example: the emoji on your phone. One glance and you know the meaning. In function they are remarkably close to kanji — for writing was, from the start, a system you could see and understand.

Two combined, one made a radical — and the characters multiply

At first there were the basic characters a first-grader learns. From there, by combining two, or turning one into a radical, the characters multiplied. By the Qing dynasty, the Kangxi Dictionary is said to have gathered more than fifty thousand of them.

Writing gave birth to the scripts

As the characters grew, so did the question of how to write them — and from that came five scripts: seal (tensho), clerical (reisho), semi-cursive (gyosho), cursive (sosho) and standard (kaisho), each changing with its age. Know a character’s origins, and it begins to look different in your hand.

Knowing the origins changes the writing

Behind a single character lies a scene the ancients once saw. Seen that way, a character you merely “copy” rises up as a form charged with meaning. To know a character’s roots is to deepen how you express it.

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