Japan’s ‘Hentaigana’: The Lost Characters

Walk down a street in modern Japan, and the written language you see is a marvel of structured complexity: angular katakana for foreign words, intricate kanji for core concepts, and the gracefully rounded hiragana for grammatical particles and native words. This system, while challenging for learners, is highly standardized. The character か always represents the “ka” sound, and な is always “na.” But it wasn’t always this way.

For over a thousand years, Japanese was written with a much larger, more fluid, and artistically wild set of characters. Tucked away in classical literature, elegant calligraphy, and the occasional traditional shop sign are the ghosts of a forgotten script: the hentaigana (変体仮名), or “variant kana.” These are the lost characters of Japan, and their story reveals a fascinating clash between artistry and standardization.

What Are ‘Hentaigana’? A Quick Clarification

First, let’s address the name. To a modern Japanese speaker or anime fan, the word hentai (変態) immediately brings to mind a specific genre of adult media. However, in this context, the word uses the same kanji but has its original, non-sexual meaning. 変 (hen) means “strange”, “unusual”, or “variant”, and 体 (tai) means “form” or “body.” Thus, hentaigana (変体仮名) simply means “variant character forms.” These characters are not perverse; they are simply the non-standardized relatives of the hiragana we know today.

From Chinese Characters to a Thousand Flowers Blooming

To understand where hentaigana came from, we have to go back to the origins of hiragana itself. Japan did not have its own writing system until it imported Chinese characters, or kanji, around the 5th century CE. Initially, Japanese was written entirely in Chinese, but this was awkward for a language with a completely different grammatical structure.

As a solution, scholars developed a system called man’yōgana (万葉仮名), where kanji were used purely for their phonetic sound, ignoring their meaning. For example, to write the sound “ka”, one could use the kanji 加, 可, 家, or 香, all of which were read as “ka” in certain contexts.

Over time, these man’yōgana were simplified for faster, more fluid writing, particularly by court women who were often discouraged from studying the more “masculine” kanji. This cursive, simplified script became hiragana. Herein lies the origin of hentaigana: since multiple kanji existed for the same sound, multiple hiragana were born from them!

Let’s take our “ka” example again:

• The kanji 加 was simplified into the character か, which became the standard hiragana for “ka.”
• The kanji 可 was simplified into a different cursive character (𛀙), which became a hentaigana for “ka.”
• The kanji 家 was simplified into yet another form (𛀚), another hentaigana for “ka.”

For centuries, there was no single “correct” hiragana for a sound. A writer could choose from a rich palette of characters based on aesthetic preference, calligraphic flow, or even subtle nuances inherited from the parent kanji. It was a system that valued beauty and personal expression over rigid uniformity.

An Art Form: Hentaigana in Classical Japan

In the Heian period (794-1185) and beyond, writing was an art. A person’s education and refinement were judged by their handwriting. In this environment, hentaigana weren’t just functional; they were essential tools for a calligrapher.

Imagine writing a poem. Using the same hiragana character for the sound “no” (の) three times in a short verse would look repetitive and artless. Instead, a skilled writer could use the standard の (derived from 乃), and then switch to a hentaigana variant for “no”, like one derived from 能, to create visual variety and a more dynamic composition. The choice of which hentaigana to use could affect the spacing, balance, and overall rhythm of the written line.

This is why reading original classical texts like The Tale of Genji or the poetry of Ono no Komachi is so challenging without special training. The pages are a flowing dance of characters that are unrecognizable to most modern readers. Modern printed versions are translations, transcribing the hentaigana into the standard 48-character hiragana set we use today.

The End of an Era: Meiji Modernization and Standardization

So what happened to this vast and varied alphabet? The death knell for hentaigana was the Meiji Restoration in 1868. As Japan rapidly modernized, industrialized, and opened itself to the world, the government identified a need for national unity and mass education. The complex, non-standardized writing system was seen as an impediment to progress.

How could you build a national education system when every school might teach different characters for the same sound? How could you efficiently use new technologies like the printing press if a typesetter needed a case with hundreds of different hiragana characters?

The solution came in 1900 with a sweeping reform of the national script. The “Elementary School Ordinance” mandated a one-to-one relationship: one sound, one official hiragana character. The character chosen was typically the one with the simplest form or the most common usage. All other variants were officially declared obsolete for educational and governmental purposes. It was at this moment that they were formally relegated to the status of hentaigana—”variant kana.”

Hentaigana Today: Echoes of a Lost Script

Though officially retired from mainstream use for over a century, hentaigana haven’t completely disappeared. They have retreated into specific niches where tradition and aesthetic value are prized over modern efficiency.

You are most likely to spot them in the wild on:

• Traditional Shop Signs: Many old-fashioned soba (buckwheat noodle) or unagi (eel) restaurants use hentaigana to signal authenticity and craftsmanship. A common example is the sign for soba (そば). The “ba” sound is often written not with ば, but with a cursive version of the kanji 者, which is a hentaigana for “ha” (which becomes “ba” with the diacritic marks).
• Certificates and Awards: Calligraphically rendered documents, such as martial arts licenses (menkyo), traditional art school diplomas, and other formal awards, often employ hentaigana to lend an air of classical authority.
• Academic Circles: For scholars of Japanese history, art, and literature, learning to read hentaigana is a crucial skill for engaging with primary source materials.

In a wonderful nod to their importance, hentaigana received a major digital boost in 2017 when over 280 of them were added to the Unicode standard. This ensures that these beautiful, historic characters can be preserved and studied digitally for generations to come.

The story of hentaigana is more than a linguistic footnote. It’s a tale of how cultures evolve, balancing the rich, chaotic beauty of the past with the pragmatic demands of the future. While we may have lost the daily use of these “variant characters”, they remain a beautiful reminder of a time when writing was as much an act of art as it was of communication.