Kanbun in its most literal definition means "Chinese writing". The
Japanese writing system originated through adoption and adaptation of
written Chinese (
kanbun). Some of Japan's oldest books (e.g. the
Nihon Shoki) and dictionaries (e.g. the
Tenrei Banshō Meigi and
Wamyō Ruijushō) were written in
kanbun. Other Japanese literary genres have parallels; the
Kaifūsō is the oldest collection of .
Burton Watson's English translations of
kanbun compositions provide an introduction to this literary field.
Kanbun is described by
Jean-Noël Robert as a "perfectly frozen '
dead language that was continuously used from the late
Heian period (794–1185) until after World War II. Kanbun, otherwise known as
Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese, had long since ceased to be a colloquial language in China. Yet all the oldest writing in Japan are in
kanbun and predate any written documents in Japanese, although there is considerable debate if these Chinese texts contained traces of the Japanese vernacular. Taking into consideration all the texts written in both Japanese and Chinese, including monastic documents, as well as 'near-Chinese' (
hentai-kanbun) texts, the amount of Chinese writing in Japan may exceed what was written in Japanese. Despite the size, quality, and importance of
kanbun writing, John Timothy Wixted notes that scholars have disregarded
kanbun as an area of study until recent times and it is the least properly represented part of the Japanese canon. Aside from Chinese writing,
kanbun also refers to a genre of techniques for reading Chinese texts read like Japanese or for writing in a way similar to Chinese.
Samuel Martin coined the term
Sino-Xenic in 1953 to describe Chinese as written in Japan, Korea, and other foreign (hence
-xenic) zones on China's periphery.
Roy Andrew Miller notes that although Japanese
kanbun conventions have
Sino-Xenic parallels with other traditions for reading Literary Chinese like Korean
hanmun and Vietnamese , only
kanbun has survived to the present day. In the Japanese
kanbun reading tradition, the Chinese text is transformed through punctuation, analysis, and translation into classical Japanese. Through a limited canon of Japanese forms and syntactic structures treated as though they existed in alignment with vocabulary and structures of Classical Chinese, the
kanbun text could be read in drastically different ways. At its most extreme, this type of reading could render the text so simplified that it could be understood through an elementary student's perspective. At its best, it could preserve a large body of Classical Chinese texts that would have otherwise been lost. Thus the
kanbun could also be of great value for understanding early Chinese literature. There were several linguistic hurdles involved in
kanbun transformation. Chinese grammatical order is
subject–verb–object (SVO) and uses
particles similar to
English prepositions whereas morphemes are typically one syllable in length and inflection plays no role in the grammar. Conversely, Japanese sentence order uses
SOV with syntactic features, including positions such as grammar particles that appear the words and phrases to which they apply. Four major problems faced when transforming
kanbun are the
word order, parsing which Chinese characters should be read together, deciding how to pronounce the characters, and finding suitable equivalents for Chinese
function words. A new development in
kanbun studies is the Web-accessible database being developed by scholars at
Nishogakusha University in Tokyo. == Terminology ==