A history of Japanese calligraphy

Why we say 1,200 years

Shodo (Japanese calligraphy) is often called a 1,200-year-old art, and the number has a clear anchor. In about 812, the monk Kukai wrote a letter to his fellow monk Saicho that opens with the words “wind news, cloud letter.”

That letter, the Fushinjo 風信帖, still exists. Three of Kukai’s letters to Saicho are mounted on one scroll at To-ji temple in Kyoto, protected as a National Treasure, and copied by students to this day.

Writing in Japan is older than that, as you will see below. But Kukai and his two contemporaries, the Three Brushes, are where Japan’s roll of famous calligraphers conventionally begins, and the Fushinjo is the classic model that has been copied for more than 1,200 years.

The story, era by era

1. c. 1200 BCE–907 CEChina: from carved bones to the brush

   The oldest Chinese writing we know was carved on turtle shells and ox bones more than 3,000 years ago, in the Shang dynasty, to record questions put to the gods. Those pictographs are the ancestors of the characters you will write.

   When the Qin dynasty unified China in 221 BCE, it made one seal script the standard for the whole empire. Under the Han dynasty, clerks writing quickly with a brush flattened those shapes into clerical script, and by the end of the Han a new upright form was appearing: regular script.

   Brush writing was admired as an art by the fourth century. Wang Xizhi (c. 303–361), later called the “Sage of Calligraphy,” wrote his famous preface for a gathering of poets in 353.

   The original is lost, but Tang-dynasty copies survive, and students in China and Japan have copied them ever since.

   In the Tang dynasty (618–907), masters such as Ouyang Xun (557–641) and Yan Zhenqing (709–785) brought regular script to its mature form. This is the script Japanese children learn first, and the one on our practice sheets.

   

2. 400s–600sWriting arrives in Japan

   Japan had no writing of its own. Chinese characters came across the sea, much of the way by the Korean Peninsula, and by the fifth century they were being used in Japan.

   The clearest proof is an iron sword dug up in Saitama in 1968. X-rays taken ten years later revealed 115 characters inlaid in gold, naming a local lord who served the great king, with a date that scholars read as the year 471.

   In the sixth century, in 538 or 552 according to different old records, Buddhism arrived from the Korean kingdom of Baekje, and with it came sutras: long texts in Chinese that had to be read, copied, and taught.

3. 710–794Nara: copying sutras, by the thousand

   In the Nara period, copying Buddhist scriptures by hand, called shakyo 写経, became both a religious act and a state project. Empress Komyo ran a scriptorium that produced thousands of scrolls; one set carries a dedication dated to the first day of the fifth month of 740.

   The copyists were professionals, and the office records show they could be fined for mistakes. Their steady, even regular script, close to Tang models, is the first great body of Japanese brush writing.

   Hundreds of their scrolls survive in the Shoso-in treasure house at Todai-ji, together with the office records that tell us how they worked.

   

4. 794–900sEarly Heian: the Three Brushes

   Three men of the early ninth century are remembered as the Sanpitsu 三筆, “the Three Brushes”: the monk Kukai (774–835), Emperor Saga (786–842), and the court official Tachibana no Hayanari (died 842). All three wrote in a strongly Chinese manner, modeled on Wang Xizhi and the Tang masters.

   Kukai had studied in the Tang capital from 804 to 806 and brought back not only esoteric Buddhism but also the latest calligraphy. He is so admired that Japanese still say “even Kobo slips with the brush,” using his posthumous name Kobo Daishi, to mean that even an expert makes mistakes.

   The grouping itself is a later invention: the label “Three Brushes” first appears in books of the Edo period, about 900 years after the men lived.

   

5. 900s–1185Mid and late Heian: the Japanese style and kana

   About a century after Kukai, a softer, rounder, more flowing hand developed that felt distinctly Japanese. It is called wayo 和様, “the Japanese style,” as opposed to karayo 唐様, “the Chinese style.”

   Three calligraphers carried it: Ono no Michikaze (894–966), who began it; Fujiwara no Sukemasa (944–998); and Fujiwara no Yukinari (972–1027), who perfected it and whose descendants kept it alive as the Sesonji school. They are the Sanseki 三跡, “the Three Traces.”

   In the same centuries Japan invented its own phonetic scripts, kana. Hiragana grew out of very cursive, simplified forms of Chinese characters used for their sounds.

   Katakana grew out of small pieces of characters that monks wrote beside Chinese texts as reading aids. Hiragana, above all, made it possible to write Japanese as it was spoken.

   The first imperial poetry anthology, the Kokin wakashu, was compiled from 905, and The Tale of Genji was written in the early eleventh century. Kana calligraphy, with its thin lines and connected characters, became an art in its own right that is still studied today.

   

6. 1185–1573Kamakura and Muromachi: Zen monks and ink traces

   From the late twelfth century, Japanese monks who had trained in China brought Zen Buddhism home, and Chinese Zen masters came to Japan. The monk Lanxi Daolong arrived in 1246 and became the founding abbot of Kencho-ji in Kamakura in 1253, and with monks like him came a fresh wave of Chinese calligraphy.

   The writing of Zen masters is called bokuseki 墨跡, “ink traces”: sermons, verses, and certificates of enlightenment, brushed with force rather than polish. Shuho Myocho (1282–1337), founder of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto, Muso Soseki (1275–1351), and later Ikkyu Sojun (1394–1481) are among the most admired.

   Bokuseki found a second home in the tea room. A classic tea text, the Nanboroku, which records the teachings of Sen no Rikyu (1522–1591), says that the writing of Zen priests is the most suitable scroll to hang there, and the practice continues in tea rooms today.

   

7. 1603–1868Edo: reading, writing, and the abacus

   In the Edo period, ordinary children learned to write in large numbers for the first time. Small private schools called terakoya 寺子屋 taught “yomi, kaki, soroban“: reading, writing, and the abacus, and by the end of the period there were well over ten thousand of them.

   Children learned by copying model letters and word lists, called oraimono, written out by the teacher in a rounded, easy-to-read wayo hand called Oie-ryu 御家流. This style descended from Prince Son’en (1298–1356) of the Shoren-in temple, and the shogunate used it for official documents, so it became the handwriting of the whole country.

   Alongside it, scholars and artists revived the Chinese manner. Chinese monks of the Obaku school, led by Yinyuan (Ingen), who arrived in 1654 and founded Manpuku-ji in 1661, brought the brushwork of Ming China, and Confucian scholars such as Kitajima Setsuzan and Hosoi Kotaku spread this karayo among the educated.

   Edo Japan had two scripts side by side: Japanese style for daily life, Chinese style for the learned.

   Edo is also when kakizome 書き初め, the first writing of the New Year, spread from the court and the samurai to the children of the terakoya.

   

8. 1868–1912Meiji: schools for everyone, and a new look at China

   In 1872 the new Meiji government ordered elementary schools for all children, and brush writing, under the name shuji, was one of the subjects from the start. The terakoya disappeared as public schools took over.

   In 1880 a Chinese scholar and collector, Yang Shoujing, came to Japan with cases of rubbings from ancient Chinese stone inscriptions. Calligraphers such as Kusakabe Meikaku (1838–1922), Iwaya Ichiroku, and Matsuda Sekka studied with him and launched a revival of Six Dynasties styles that swept the Meiji calligraphy world.

   The result was a change of taste. The rounded Oie-ryu hand of the Edo period lost ground to Chinese-style writing among calligraphers and in public life, while the schoolroom kept teaching a clear, upright regular script.

9. 1900s–todayShodo as school subject, art, and performance

   As pens and pencils took over everyday writing, the brush became something people chose to learn. In Japanese schools the subject is shosha 書写, part of the Japanese language class, and children write with the brush from the third grade.

   Calligraphy entered the national art exhibition, the Nitten, in 1948, alongside painting, sculpture, and crafts. At the same time a few calligraphers broke with legibility itself.

   Hidai Nankoku’s 1945 piece built on an ancient form of the character for lightning, with nothing left to read, is counted as the first avant-garde calligraphy, and in 1952 Morita Shiryu, Inoue Yuichi, and others founded the Bokujinkai group. Inoue (1916–1985), an elementary school teacher by day, won international attention when his work was shown at the São Paulo Biennale in 1957.

   The newest lesson is noisy and joyful. Since 2008 the paper-making city of Shikokuchuo in Ehime has held the Shodo Performance Koshien, a contest in which high school teams write on huge sheets of paper to music, inspired by the local Mishima High School club that had been performing at town events.

   Three schools entered the first year; more than a hundred now apply.

   And every January 2, children across Japan still sit down for kakizome, the first writing of the year, a custom that goes back to a New Year ritual at the Heian court and spread to everyone through the terakoya.

Where the five scripts came from

The five scripts you meet in shodo are a time line of Chinese writing. Seal script 篆書 is the standardized Qin form, still used on seals.

Clerical script 隷書 is the flatter, wider Han form that clerks developed for speed. Regular script 楷書 emerged at the end of the Han and matured in the Tang.

Running script 行書 and cursive script 草書 are faster, more connected ways of writing that grew up alongside it. Japan received all five and added its own kana.

For what each one looks like and how to tell them apart, see the five scripts.

Chinese style and Japanese style

Japanese calligraphers have moved between two poles for a thousand years. Neither is “better”; most calligraphers have practiced both.

How this history reaches a classroom today

When a child in Japan copies a model today, the method is the one the Nara copyists and the terakoya children used: look at a teacher’s model, write it, be corrected in red, write it again. The characters are the Tang regular script, the custom of kakizome is Edo, the public-school subject is Meiji, and the third-grade start with the brush is postwar, set in the 1958 curriculum.

Our school, Kodomo School, in Toyohashi, has taught children since 1976, and we teach the abacus and brush writing side by side, just as the terakoya did. To see what a lesson looks like now, read how children learn calligraphy in Japan.

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