The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.

Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.

[4] The total number of kanji is well over 50,000, though this includes tens of thousands of characters only present in historical writings and never used in modern Japanese.

It is known from archaeological evidence that the first contacts that the Japanese had with Chinese writing took place in the 1st century AD, during the late Yayoi period.

However, the Japanese people of that era probably had little to no comprehension of the script, and they would remain relatively illiterate until the 5th century AD in the Kofun period, when writing in Japan became more widespread.

For example, in Natsume Sōseki's short story The Fifth Night, the author uses 接続って for tsunagatte, the gerundive -te form of the verb tsunagaru ("to connect"), which would usually be written as 繋がって or つながって.

Hiragana (平仮名) emerged as a manual simplification via cursive script of the most phonetically widespread kanji among those who could read and write during the Heian period (794–1185).

The main creators of the current hiragana were ladies of the Japanese imperial court, who used the script in the writing of personal communications and literature.

Arabic numerals were introduced in Japan probably at the same time as the Latin alphabet, in the 16th century during the Muromachi period, the first contact being via Portuguese navigators.

Sentences are commonly written using a combination of all three Japanese scripts: kanji (in red), hiragana (in purple), and katakana (in orange), and in limited instances also include Latin alphabet characters (in green) and Arabic numerals (in black): The same text can be transliterated to the Latin alphabet (rōmaji), although this will generally only be done for the convenience of foreign language speakers: Translated into English, this reads: All words in modern Japanese can be written using hiragana, katakana, and rōmaji, while only some have kanji.

Another example is 消しゴム (rōmaji: keshigomu) which means "eraser", and uses a kanji, a hiragana, and two katakana characters, in that order.

This convention was originally modelled on Chinese writing, where spacing is superfluous because each character is essentially a word in itself (albeit compounds are common).

However, in kana and mixed kana/kanji text, readers of Japanese must work out where word divisions lie based on an understanding of what makes sense.

For example, あなたはお母さんにそっくりね。 must be mentally divided as あなた　は　お母さん　に　そっくり　ね。 (Anata wa okāsan ni sokkuri ne, "You're just like your mother").

Words in potentially unfamiliar foreign compounds, normally transliterated in katakana, may be separated by a punctuation mark called a 中黒 (nakaguro, "middle dot") to aid Japanese readers.

This punctuation is also occasionally used to separate native Japanese words, especially in concatenations of kanji characters where there might otherwise be confusion or ambiguity about interpretation, and especially for the full names of people.

Eventually a system called kanbun (漢文) developed, which, along with kanji and something very similar to Chinese grammar, employed diacritics to hint at the Japanese translation.

No full-fledged script for written Japanese existed until the development of man'yōgana (万葉仮名), which appropriated kanji for their phonetic value (derived from their Chinese readings) rather than their semantic value.

Man'yōgana was initially used to record poetry, as in the Man'yōshū (万葉集), compiled sometime before 759, whence the writing system derives its name.

This Chinese-derived reading is known as on'yomi (音読み), and this vocabulary as a whole is referred to as Sino-Japanese in English and kango (漢語) in Japanese.

The significant reforms of the 19th century Meiji era did not initially impact the Japanese writing system.

The difficulty of written Japanese was a topic of debate, with several proposals in the late 19th century that the number of kanji in use be limited.

In addition, exposure to non-Japanese texts led to unsuccessful proposals that Japanese be written entirely in kana or rōmaji.

The major reforms were: At one stage, an advisor in the Occupation administration proposed a wholesale conversion to rōmaji, but it was not endorsed by other specialists and did not proceed.

The Hepburn method of romanization, designed for English speakers, is a de facto standard widely used inside and outside Japan.