page_title: Adoption of Chinese literary culture
section_title: Japan
hierarchical_section_title: Adoption of Chinese literary culture / Japan
caption_attribution_description: English: A page from the Tanaka version of the Nihon Shoki
context_page_description: Chinese writing, culture and institutions were imported as a whole by Vietnam, Korea, Japan and other neighbouring states over an extended period. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries AD, followed by Confucianism as these countries developed strong central governments modelled on Chinese institutions.
  In Vietnam and Korea, and for a shorter time in Japan and the Ryukyus, scholar-officials were selected using examinations on the Confucian classics modelled on the Chinese civil service examinations.
  Shared familiarity with the Chinese classics and Confucian values provided a common framework for intellectuals and ruling elites across the region.
  All of this was based on the use of Literary Chinese, which became the medium of scholarship and government across the region.
  Although each of these countries developed vernacular writing systems and used them for popular literature, they continued to use Chinese for all formal writing until it was swept away by rising nationalism around the end of the 19th century.
  During the 20th century, several Japanese historians grouped these three countries with China as an East Asian cultural realm.
context_section_description: Unlike Vietnam and Korea, no part of Japan was ever occupied by China.
  Chinese writing was brought to Japan by Buddhist missionaries from Korea, probably around the 4th or 5th centuries.
  The early 8th century histories Nihon Shoki and Kojiki credit a scholar called Wani from Baekje with first bringing the Confucian classics to Japan, though many scholars have questioned this account.
  By 607 Japan had opened direct contacts with Sui dynasty China, continued under the following Tang dynasty, and proceeded to import Chinese language and culture wholesale.
  Even the layout of the Japanese capital of Nara was modelled on the Tang capital Chang'an.
  All formal writing during the Nara (710–794) and Heian (794–1185) periods was done in Literary Chinese.
  The earliest collection of Chinese poetry by Japanese authors (Kanshi) was the Kaifūsō, compiled in 751.
  A series of Six National Histories in the Chinese style, covering the period to 887, were written in the Nara and Heian periods.
  A seventh was begun but abandoned in the 10th century.
  The Ritsuryō (757) and Engi shiki (927) were legal codes on the Chinese model.
  As Japanese is very different from Chinese, with inflections and different word order, Japanese scholars developed kanbun kundoku, an elaborate method of annotating Literary Chinese so that it could be re-arranged and read as Japanese.
  There had been experiments with adapting Chinese characters to write Japanese since the 7th century, and by the early 10th century these had been simplified to the kana syllabaries still in use today.
  However Chinese had such prestige in the Heian period that only women and low-status men wrote in Japanese.
  As a result, court women produced much of the Japanese-language fiction of the period, with the most famous being the Tale of Genji.
  Around 700, an imperial academy (the Daigaku-ryō) was founded to train the sons of the aristocracy in Chinese and the classics and to administer the first stage of civil service examinations.
  It flourished in the 9th century but went into decline in the 10th, as the central bureaucracy and use of Chinese faded away.
  By 1135 the site was overgrown; the buildings were destroyed in the great fire of 1177.
  By the 13th century knowledge of Literary Chinese had become so limited that the government had to delegate official writing, including correspondence before the unsuccessful Mongol invasions of Japan, to the Buddhist clergy.
  The re-establishment of strong central government by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1600 was followed by a revival of Confucianism.
  Literary Chinese remained the preferred medium for formal writing until the late 19th century.
  A style mixing Chinese and Japanese elements (sōrōbun) was derived from the medieval hentai-kanbun ("variant Chinese writing") used in such works as the historical chronicle Azuma Kagami (1266).
  It was used during the Meiji period, and as late as the end of the Second World War, by men for diaries and correspondence, and for various public notices.
  Both have since been replaced by writing in Japanese, using a script combining Chinese characters (Kanji) and kana syllabaries.
caption: Nihon Shoki, an 8th-century history of Japan written in Chinese
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