Overview of Calligraphy
Since the earliest adoption of Chinese writing in the 5th century, calligraphy, along with poetry-making and ink painting, has been regarded as a skill essential to every cultivated man and woman in Japan.
The first writing that Japan copied from China were characters used in official documents or for copying Buddhist sutras. From the 9th century, courtiers and Japanese priests (notably Kukai, 774-835) developed two phonetic scripts, hiragana and katakana, known collectively as kana. Women writers in the 10th century embraced kana script since it gave them greater freedom to express their native sentiments. They wrote poetry, and some of Japan's great works of literature in kana combined with Chinese characters. Kana is still used in combination with Chinese characters to write Japanese. Generally speaking, Chinese characters (kanji) are used for nouns, verbs and adjectives; hiragana is used for pronouns and the endings of verbs, adverbs, and adjectives to show tense; and katakana is used for foreign words.
Throughout history, men of letters in Japan were accomplished calligraphers. In the Edo period (1600-1868), the copying of edifying texts was the main form of education for all classes. Warriors were trained in calligraphy as well as in martial arts.
Today men and women especially talented at calligraphy are known as shoka, or writers of sho (calligraphy), and they practice one or more of five major styles: the archaic tensho script (developed from Chinese seals), a revised version called reisho "squared characters" used for clerical scripts, kaisho block-style script, and cursive styles such as gyosho "running script" or sosho "grass writing". So-called kana calligraphy is studied mainly by women, especially through the elegant transcription of the 31-syllable waka poems.
In post-World War II Japan, avant-garde calligraphy (zen'ei shodo) was born - a genre in itself. This recent trend in calligraphy asserts new artistic forms of pure abstraction, deviating sharply from traditional script styles.
The calligraphy genre in Japan also includes the arts of seal engraving (tenkoku) on small stone seals and calligraphic wood carving (kokuji), which is like sculptural relief.
Bokuseki, the works of calligraphy of noted Zen priests, are collector's items, and many priests still make a good living today out of writing Zen sayings for tea ceremony rooms.
The essential tools of a calligrapher are brush, ink and inkstone. The ink (made of oil or pine soot hardened into a block with hide or fishbone glue) is rubbed with water on the ink stone to make ink of the desired consistency. These are kept in a box called suzuribako with a water dropper (suiteki). All of these implements are often works of art in their own right. A variety of decorative papers are also available for certain styles of calligraphy.
Shuji, the Japanese equivalent of penmanship, is taught at elementary and junior high schools today, but there are thousands more amateur calligraphers who practice under teachers or in their homes, diligently trying to acquire the styles of masters.
