Books

An instructive book on the Japanese alphabet

Writing Japanese (and Chinese) with a brush inherently utilizes both the Chinese characters (kanji 漢字) and the two alphabets, mostly hiragana, and more seldom, katakana. Mr. Ouchida’s, book which he wrote in response to my request for a guide to hiragana, shows a number of elements of the hiragana alphabet. First of all, he uses an ancient poem thought to have been created in the Heian era (AD 794 – 1179). It is famous because of two characteristics – one, it is a pangram, a sentence that uses every letter at least once, and it is also an isogram, a word or phrase without a repeated letter. Much later, I discovered that Mr. Ouchida had also created another, very sophisticated book, which I will discuss later, from yet another isogram – an ancient Chinese poem titled Senjibun, in which there are 1,000 characters, none of which appear more than once. The purpose of utilizing such nonrepeated word/character poems appears to be as educational tools. The I-Ro-Ha poem is also attributed to a source of ancient Buddhist poetry.

The (千字文) Sen-Ji-Bun literally means, “1,000-Character Writing.” It is a one thousand character Chinese poem, a pangram and a isogram, as is the ancient i-ro-ha Japanese alphabet poem in which no two characters are repeated. It was originally titled “The Book of the Second Rhyme Wang Xizhi” by Zhou Xingse (502-549).

While a number of books have been written on this popular writing, one displays each character in columns of three styles of writing. Another book has five styles. Mr. Ouchida instead wrote separate books in each style, and yet another that includes four styles together. He also wrote a book of sōsho style with easy-to-read kaisho next to each character which a sample is included later in the book.

According to the history of the poem, it was used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children from the sixth century. It was organized into four-line rhyming stanzas to make it easy to memorize. It could be sung in a similar way that English-speaking school children sing the ABC’s and was taught not only in China but also in Korea.

Four-Style 1000-Character Poem book in Kaisho, Gyōsho, Sōsho and Reisho