②The introduction of Chinese characters not only gave a writing system to the Japanese language, but also brought new concepts, ideas, and vocabulary from China into Japan. Many of these new concepts and ideas were related to politics, religion, or philosophy. Examples include words for “king,” “imperial court,” “state,” “nation,” and “world,” as well as “Buddha,” “Bodhisattva,” “temple,” “sutra,” “hell,” “paradise,” “benevolence,” “justice,” “propriety,” “wisdom,” and “ faithfulness.”

③As time passed, instead of simply using Chinese characters as they were, the Japanese people came up with the ingenious idea of adapting them to their own language. This eventually led to the development of two new forms of writing: hiragana and katakana. Some Chinese characters were simplified into the flowing forms of hiragana, while parts of some Chinese characters were used to create the more angular forms of katakana.

 In other words, they turned Chinese characters into something uniquely Japanese.

④These developments made it possible to express Japanese more freely in writing, helping to lay the foundation for Japan's rich literary and cultural tradition.

【①  の具体例の説明】

Using Chinese characters in these ways, a historical narrative called the Record of Ancient Matters was completed by the government in the early eighth century. It tells how the Japanese archipelago was created and how a succession of emperors ruled Japan, beginning with the  legendary first emperor. It is considered Japan’s first historical record, but much of it is actually mythology. In the story, the name Amaterasu was written using the Chinese characters 天照, which literally mean “heaven shining.”

I’d also like to mention that, by that time, there was already a tradition of composing poems in everyday life. These poems were later collected and compiled into the Man'yōshū, or Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, the oldest extant anthology of Japanese poetry. The poems were written down using Chinese characters, some for their meanings and others simply to represent Japanese sounds.

【②    の具体例】

Hiragana and katakana began to develop around the ninth century. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, these hiragana and katakana came to be widely used in Japanese literary works. A typical example is The Tale of Genji, which was written in the early eleventh century by a woman at the imperial court named Murasaki Shikibu. This tale is world-famous and has been translated into many languages around the world. It was written mainly in hiragana, with some Chinese characters.