Many Cultures Borrow. Japan Transforms.

A Japanese sentence is often as mongrel as a Japanese street. While walking through a shopping arcade in Osaka — here a tatami tearoom, there a French cafe, in between a McDonald’s — you’ll notice Chinese characters, known as kanji, on many storefront signs. Elsewhere are words written in a simplified Japanese syllabary (hiragana), and also in another syllabary (katakana), generally used for transliterating foreign terms; both were developed in the ninth century. You’ll even come across Roman letters, as well as Arabic numerals, making for a mixture drawn from many places that remains exclusively Japanese.

The result is what Christopher Seeley, a scholar of languages, has called the most complicated system of writing in use in the modern world. It’s also a system largely inaccessible to those who read only Chinese. Even as the Japanese were relying entirely on Chinese characters 14 centuries ago, they placed them in a word order that was distinctly Japanese. And when foreign items began flooding into the country in the 19th century during the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese flouted traditional logic by transliterating the word for “logic,” for example, into homophonic Chinese characters, rendering the term doubly impenetrable.

Many of us know that Japan took its Buddhism, its urban design, its flower-viewing rites and several of its art forms from China, often by way of Korea. You feel that influence today everywhere from the Confucian values that order society to the 72 microseasons that determine what quite a few of my Japanese neighbors eat and what they wear. After the country was forced to open up in 1853 with the arrival of four ships led by the American commodore Matthew C. Perry following 214 years of official isolation, suddenly everything Western — garden parties, waltzing, even rabbits — became the rage. And after being defeated in war in 1945, the ever-practical Japanese decided to import many of the products and customs — right up to democracy — of their conqueror.