Jilson, 7
from the fourth to the sixth century). This system of pronunciation, called go’on, was used in
Japan until around 712 when the historical text known as the Kojiki was completed. (Miller, 102)
However the historical text known as the Nihon Shoki that was completed in 720 uses a different
system of Chinese pronunciation. During this time period a new variety of Chinese that emerged
from the T’ang metropolitan centers had replaced the Six Dynasties pronunciations. This new
system was called kan’on and spread quickly throughout Japan. (Miller, 103) It was particularly
popular in Confucian learning and secular studies. It was resisted the most by Buddhists and
there are Buddhist words that still exist with go’on pronunciations. Many Chinese loanwords that
were already widely used in the language were similar.
Another way of writing Japanese terms was to use Chinese characters as a rebus.
Characters that had become associated with particular Japanese words were then used for the
sounds of the Japanese word, but not the meaning. For example, the Chinese character t’ing,
meaning garden, became associated with the Japanese word for garden, niwa. Once that had been
established, the Chinese character could then be used to represent the Japanese grammatical
combination of ni wa, meaning in. This style of writing became known as ateji and was primarily
used and promoted by the upper class for aesthetics and to provide entertainment when reading.
(Miller, 98) Ateji could become particularly difficult if the reader does not know Chinese as well
as the Japanese. For example, the Japanese verb id-u, meaning come out or leave could be
written with the Chinese characters meaning “on top of a mountain there is another mountain”.
This was because the Chinese verb meaning come out or leave, ch’u, was written by
reduplicating the graph for the word mountain. (Miller, 99)
One of the more difficult complications of using Chinese to write Japanese was the
different syntactic structures used by each language. In some cases a Chinese clause could be