what are the modern japanese letters called
The Chinese characters used to write out sounds were visually simplified and made distinct from the Chinese characters used as logograms. The Two Kana Systems. A syllabic grapheme in the Japanese writing system is called a kana. There are two sets of kanas, namely, hiragana, and katakana. In modern times, hiragana is used to write native Japanese words. Its origin lies in the early literary works which used Chinese characters completely for their phonetic values at the 8th century CE. This system is called the manyogana, from the anthological work Manyoshu.