I went to Kyoto for a holiday recently and thoroughly enjoyed the much-needed break. I speak a little Japanese, having learned the language at elementary level years ago, but it is because I read Chinese characters and the Japanese kana writing system that getting around was easy. Chinese characters (kanji) are an integral part of written Japanese.
Illustration: Bay Leung
Of the three nations that adopted Chinese script as their writing systems, only Japan has retained Chinese characters in a significant way. South Korea rarely uses Chinese characters while written Vietnamese is completely Romanised. However, it's not uncommon to see a piece of contemporary Japanese writing in which kanji make up almost half the text.
Given that the Japanese began using Chinese characters sometime in the middle of the first millennium AD, many kanji retain the original Chinese meanings. But the same characters no longer mean the same thing in modern Chinese, except in formal writing or when archaic language is required (for example, in period fiction).
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One everyday example is the Japanese word for "hot water", pronounced yuu and written in kanji as
. The same character in modern Chinese ("tang" in Putonghua, "tong" in Cantonese) now means "soup", though it was the word for "hot water" in archaic Chinese. But not even Hongkongers, whose written Chinese can be almost defiantly antiquarian, would ask for a cup of tong in a cha chaan teng to wash their cutlery with.
