Man'yōgana in the context of Shodō

Kana (仮名; Japanese pronunciation: [ka.na]) are syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. In current usage, kana most commonly refers to hiragana and katakana. It can also refer to their ancestor magana (真仮名; lit. 'true kana'), which were Chinese characters used phonetically to transcribe Japanese (e.g. man'yōgana); and hentaigana, which are historical variants of the now-standard hiragana.

Katakana, with a few additions, are also used to write Ainu. A number of systems exist to write the Ryūkyūan languages, in particular Okinawan, in hiragana. Taiwanese kana were used in Taiwanese Hokkien as ruby text for Chinese characters in Taiwan when it was under Japanese rule.

In modern Japanese, ateji (当て字, 宛字 or あてじ; pronounced [ate(d)ʑi]; "assigned characters") principally refers to kanji used to phonetically represent native or borrowed words with less regard to the underlying meaning of the characters. This is similar to man'yōgana in Old Japanese. Conversely, ateji also refers to kanji used semantically without regard to the readings.

For example, the word "sushi" is often written with its ateji "寿司". Though the two characters have the readings 'su' and 'shi' respectively, the character '寿' means "one's natural life span" and '司' means "to administer", neither of which has anything to do with the food. Ateji as a means of representing loanwords has been largely superseded in modern Japanese by the use of katakana, although many ateji coined in earlier eras still linger on.

Japanese calligraphy (書道, Shodō), also called Shūji (習字), is a form of calligraphy, or artistic writing, of the Japanese language. Written Japanese was originally based on Chinese characters only, but the advent of the hiragana and katakana Japanese syllabaries resulted in intrinsically Japanese calligraphy styles.

Old Japanese (上代日本語, Jōdai Nihon-go) is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period (8th century). It became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period.Old Japanese is an early member of the Japonic language family. No genetic links to other language families have been proven.

The bulk of the Old Japanese corpus consists of poetry, especially the Man'yōshū, with a smaller number of formal prose works. These texts were written using man'yōgana, a writing system that employs Chinese characters as syllabograms or (occasionally) logograms. The language featured a few phonological differences from later forms, such as a simpler syllable structure and distinctions between several pairs of syllables that have been pronounced identically since Early Middle Japanese. The phonetic realization of these distinctions is uncertain. Internal reconstruction points to a pre-Old Japanese phase with fewer consonants and vowels.

There are a small number of municipalities in Japan whose names are written in hiragana or katakana, together known as kana, rather than kanji as is traditional for Japanese place names. Many city names written in kana have kanji equivalents that are either phonetic manyōgana, or whose kanji are outside of the jōyō kanji. Others, such as Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture, are taken from localities or landmarks whose names continue to be written in kanji. Another cause is the merger of multiple cities, one of which had the original kanji — in such cases, the hiragana place name is used to create a new identity for the merged city, distinct from the constituent city with the same kanji name.