Letters · 5 min
Hiragana is kanji written in a hurry
あ comes from 安, か from 加. All 46 characters are cursive kanji — knowing the source makes the shapes stick.
Born from writing kanji fast
Japan had no writing system of its own. After kanji arrived around the 5th century, people wrote Japanese by borrowing kanji purely for their sound, ignoring the meaning. This is called man’yōgana — to write the sound "yama" you might use 夜麻.
The problem was speed. Spending ten-plus strokes on a single syllable is exhausting. So through the Heian period (9th century) scribes wrote these kanji more and more cursively, until the shapes settled into something you could no longer trace back to the original. That is hiragana.
The "hira" in hiragana (平) means plain or easy — the easy script, as opposed to difficult kanji.
Where the 46 characters came from
Each row below lists the kanji the hiragana were smoothed down from. Write the kanji cursively and you can see the kana appear.
| Row | Source kanji |
|---|---|
| a-row | 安 以 宇 衣 於 |
| ka-row | 加 幾 久 計 己 |
| sa-row | 左 之 寸 世 曽 |
| ta-row | 太 知 川 天 止 |
| na-row | 奈 仁 奴 祢 乃 |
| ha-row | 波 比 不 部 保 |
| ma-row | 末 美 武 女 毛 |
| ya-row | 也 由 与 |
| ra-row | 良 利 留 礼 呂 |
| wa-row · ん | 和 遠 无 |
The easy ones to spot
- か ← 加: the 力 on the left survived intact.
- に ← 仁: you can still see the person radical 亻 and 二.
- り ← 利: this is the 刂 on the right.
- ち ← 知: the 矢 on the left, loosened up.
- せ ← 世: barely changed at all.
- も ← 毛: two horizontals and the long vertical.
One sound used to have several letters
Today "ka" is just か, but older texts also used shapes derived from 可 and 閑. These extra kana, now outside the standard chart, are called hentaigana.
The 1900 elementary school regulations fixed one letter per sound and the rest fell out of use. If you see an unreadable kana on a soba shop’s sign or traditional sweets packaging, it is almost certainly hentaigana.
Hiragana was long known as onnade (女手), "women’s hand". Heian classics like The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book were written in it.