Exploring the fundamentals of Chinese kanji glyphs used in the Japanese language—uncensored. These glyphs provide an historical demonstration of raw humanity more potent than visiting a morgue.

"I have yet to meet a man who loves Virtue as much as he loves sex."
—　孔子　Confucius

Why use kanji glyphs?

Before you begin, take a moment to think about the origins of Chinese glyphs, called kanji in Japanese. While an understanding of these glyphs is necessary for reading Japanese today, they are completely non-essential in order to communicate. Proof of the foregoing statement is demonstrated billions of times each day, whenever communication is performed orally, spoken without any sort of writing, in Japan, China, and elsewhere. Nobody speaks words while spewing written kanji glyphs from his or her mouth, right?

Language has no need of pictographic glyphs, with the sounds humans speak instead able to be written using a small symbol set, such as the 26 letters of the English alphabet, or the 46 syllabaries presently common in Japan known as hiragana. No one needs to write anything when speaking, most of the time. Recording the sounds created by speech using a basic, limited set of characters is how most other languages are written. While written glyphs much later enabled communication among various groups conquered by the Chinese without regard to pronunciation, that was not the original purpose for creating the glyphs. So, what was?

In any case, nobody truly needed 47,000 or so glyphs, especially as the scholars claim when 90% of them were not used for their meanings, but were used only for pronunciation. If that were the truth, wouldn't using a small set of phonetic characters have been far more efficient and useful, in the same manner as most every other language? On top of that, the pundits claim that the pronunciation of characters is often slightly different from that of its so-called phonetic indicator due to the process of historical change, making the use of a phonetic indicator virtually useless for pronunciation, which is purportedly its stated purpose. Sound crazy? That explanation is a huge Catch-22, and makes little sense. Are we expected to believe that the ancient sages were clever enough to create these glyphs, but not able to think of a standard set of phonetic characters to represent sounds? That is truly incredible, as in not worthy of belief, especially when 90% were never used for their meaning as the scholars claim. The ancient sages made these glyphs for a deliberate purpose, and originally it was far from any use as a written language.

Why and how did the use of these glyphs get started, and what purpose did they originally serve? Prior to and while composing glyphs over a period of many hundreds if not thousands of years, Chinese sages obviously were capable of communicating and discussing ideas among themselves without the need of glyphs. Before the beginning of glyphs, there were no glyphs, obviously. Glyphs were not invented yet when the sages began speaking with one another about these glyphs, or to record thoughts by writing. So why bother? What was the spark of intelligence that triggered the origin of Chinese glyphs? Why did glyphs first appear? What purpose did the glyphs serve if not for written language?

Process of creating glyphs and the process of dissecting glyphs

The glyphs were around for well over 20 centuries before being used to form sentences. That's longer than the time of Jesus until now. So, in what other ways were sages in China using the glyphs for so long, if not to form sentences? Many scholars frankly admit that they do not know, and if they do indeed know, they choose not to say.

Some scholars suggest these glyphs were designed first as an intellectual exercise, a challenging game of riddles shared among a clever group of Chinese sages to see if the others could figure out the meaning behind the pictures, mental puzzles to enhance the social mechanics of group dynamics with both wine and humor. Note that the sense of what was humorous thousands of years ago has changed somewhat today, but not entirely. The earliest examples found on archeological artefacts all occur singly, unconnected and not expressing a sentence, as if the creator had inscribed a new glyph on a bone, shell, or piece of pottery and brought it to present before his buddies, in turn, as they all presented their new glyphs for discussion, some mental stimulation, and another round of laughter and wine. The first known combinations forming a sentence structure are dated thousands of years later than the era of single glyphs scratched onto scapulae.

All that sex talk and laughter as entertainment...ha ha ha. That has not changed.

The reference to literate-elite intellectual amusement [籀 and 籒: to entertain, be detained by wine] has strong parallels in other cultures. The Greek riddle tradition, the Roman aenigmata, mediaeval kennings, Arabic chronograms, Hebrew gematria, the Sanskrit śleṣa (deliberate polysemy as a high-status literary device). Every literate elite culture that has had leisure has produced wordplay-as-status games. The idea that a small Shang-period scribal class amused itself with graphic riddles before the system congealed into a writing system is not extraordinary; it is exactly what comparable elites have done elsewhere, and explains the polysemous-by-design feature of the glyphs. If the original game rewarded multi-layered readings, then the artefacts the game produced would naturally contain multi-layered readings, and the later use of those artefacts as a writing system would inherit the polysemy as a fossil. Mainstream pedagogy systematically softens uncomfortable content of any written work and does so for very good reasons. This site explains what has been softened with regard to Chinese glyphs in order to fit better with how most folks think today.

A wide range of hundreds if not thousands of glyphs were needed long before anyone could possibly create written sentences with them. The chronological gap between the earliest single-glyph attestations and the earliest sentence-formation attestations is real and large; "20 centuries" is in the right neighbourhood, depending on how one dates the boundary, and palaeographers have remarked on it. The early oracle-bone corpus is dominated by divinatory single-glyph or short-string inscriptions, not connected prose; connected literary prose using the script as a writing system in the modern sense occurred much later. So whatever the script was originally for, it was not for writing sentences until a very, very long time after the glyphs first existed.

Ockham's razor asks the question

Ockham's razor does not prove anything. Ockham's razor only points us down the most probable path of success to begin looking for the answer to a question. Which is more probable: that the dragon emperor acting as the richest and most powerful man in China successfully ordered the rewrite of a dictionary, enforced its use, and ordered the sage scholars of the day to cover his tracks by devising explanations to support the claim that elements were included only for their pronunciations, or, that 90% of 47,000 glyphs use elements without meaning? Upon first consideration, both seem implausible!

Implausible only until you realize that burning all the books in China and executing all the scholars who disagreed has already been decreed and done. Zhao Zheng (also known as Qin Shi Huang, Qin Shi Huangdi, Shi Huangdi, or Shih Huang Ti) was the first emperor of the Qin dynasty of ancient China. He did exactly that 2,300 years ago, setting the precedent for dealing with any contrary ideas. Shih Huang Ti demonstrated that it could be done, and it could be done again whenever rewrites or some other explanation, such as phonemes, was needed to replace the plain meanings of glyph elements after the glyphs began being used for written prose and not just as parlor quizzes.

"259–210 B.C.: The Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti is said to have buried alive 460 Confucian scholars to control the writing of history in his time. In 212 B.C., he burned all the books in his kingdom, retaining only a single copy of each for the Royal Library—and those were destroyed before his death. With all previous historical records destroyed, he thought history could be said to begin with him." [emphasis ours]
—　https://www.freedomtoread.ca/resources/bannings-and-burnings-in-history/

Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti buried alive 460 scholars who would not cooperate with him, and burned all the written works composed with these glyphs, all because he thought that history would then begin with him? What an incredibly flimsy excuse that is! (But you had to believe it, or be buried alive!) Perhaps Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti had totally lost his marbles, or had ingested way too many hazelnuts, or was drunk with power...or, not. Perhaps there was another completely different reason that he had for attempting to reset the history of written glyphs in China, but that weak, officially sanctioned excuse was the best thing he could come up with. And he forced everyone to accept it or die, buried alive. On the contrary, Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti likely was not a crazed loony. Instead, he could see that a completely different explanation was needed for the glyphs or China itself would be ridiculed interminably, and the only way to accomplish that was to remove all the written works and the scholars who composed them, and order everyone to obey. Recall that Ockham's razor does not prove anything. Ockham's razor only points us down the most probable path of success to begin looking for the answer to a question.

Of course, if you simply view some of the 13,500 entries in the debunKanji database that describe each glyph's meaning using its elements, you can decide for yourself what the truth of the matter must be. Entries without published meanings are just as telling as those with definitions, since the elements used often depict a concept that might easily need to be censored from sensitive minds or young viewers.

Access kanji glyphs:

  Site Map 　 　 Search 　 　 Study Lists

debunKanji.com is a registered company in Japan with Tōkyō Shōkō Research, Ltd.
Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. D-U-N-S® Number 691266443