The ABC's of Japanese Alphabets

[Katayama Hiromoto]

Hi all,

At the risk of sounding very uneducated, what was the predominant alphabet during the Kamakura Era?

If I were a warrior of that era and wanted to write something on a banner or the like, what set of characters would I most typically have used?!?

That in mind, is there a font set or something similar available for Windows?!?

As always, thanks for the assistance.

Katayama

[Nagamochi]

During the Nara period, the Japanese upper crust started shipping, LITERALLY, shipping, their young offspring to China for their formal education, thus the use of kanji. Then eventually, mainly during the Heian period, upper class women started to develop hiragana, which worked much more concisely with the syllabic structure of Japanese, rather than forcing an arcane set-up to work for the language.
Now choosing which you would want on a banner would be equal to a period European choosing between Latin or their native toungue. However, most Nihon-jin's would default opt for kanji, unless one doesn't mind the banner looking informal, then hiragana may be used.

My two sen,
Nagamochi

[Saionji Shonagon]

Now choosing which you would want on a banner would be equal to a period European choosing between Latin or their native toungue.

I have to disagree here. It's a man's war banner, I highly doubt he'd use "women's writing!"

BTW, if you go to www.kabutographics.com, go explore the Projects section. Date-dono has a cut-and-paste Japanese alphabet page that's pretty cool. (That's how I cobbled together the stuff in my signature file.) Hiragana and katakana are on there. I can't remember if it also includes kanji....

Where's the Effingham when one needs him? This is his bailiwick....

Saionji

[AJBryant]

Here! <waving arms like an idiot>

If it's a war banner, it would likely be *entirely* in Kanji -- a text like kanbun (Classical Chinese via Classical Japanese). For an example, look at Shingen's "Fu rin ka zan" flag -- it's all kanji and is in fact Chinese, but it's "read" and conjugated in Japanese thanks to the miracle of kanbun.

Most educated men even up into the Edo period often wrote in kanbun -- it's sort of like preserving the use of Latin as an academic language even though the native language was French or Spanish or Italian or what have you.

Common texts were written in "regular" Japanese, with katakana or hiragana providing the rest of the mix. You can sometimes tell what was intended to be "popular literature" vs. "stuff for the intelligentsia" by what script it is written in -- kanbun or Japanese. (Of course, you can also just tell that some people preferred native Japanese -- Kamo no Chomei, surely no slouch as an academic, wrote his wonderful "Hojoki" in normal Japanese, and it's so basic and wonderful that it's often the first text worked on by students of Classical Japanese.)

Effingham

[Matsuyama Yoshitoshi]

Bonji (Sanskrit characters) were also used infrequently (although I'm unaware of any hata that employed them during the Kamakura era).