Is it possible to write Japanese in pure Kanji?

Question

Is it possible to write Japanese in pure Kanji?

I think I have seen in one TV news show in Osaka that they are showing snippets of newspaper written in all Kanji.

Answer 1

Is it possible to write Japanese in pure Kanji?

Yes.

This is mostly historical, however, such as the Man'yōshū poetry collection dating to roughly 759. The University of Virginia has published this online in all-kanji Old Japanese, as well as modernized orthography (spelling), and kana-only for clarification of the sound values.

As others have noted, modern Japanese makes extensive use of kana as a required element to specify particles, the inflected endings of verbs and adjectives, and other elements of the language.

... snippets of newspaper written in all Kanji

Newspapers are a special context. Space is a premium, so shorter forms are preferred, especially in headlines and captions. This kind of "headline-ese" is a weird version of Japanese, leaving out most particles and inflections. Grammatically, most headlines are parseable as noun stacks.

In a brief search, I couldn't find any headlines that were only in kanji, but the following examples come close.

• 名古屋城木造化、名古屋市副市長「１０月の許可厳しい」
• 安倍政権銘柄の持続力 人材・建設に思惑先行

If you think about it, "headline-ese" is weird in any language: English newspapers use a similar kind of special grammar for headlines to tighten things up. Examples:

• Montgomery College’s Takoma Park campus lifts lockdown
• Uber drivers suing for better pay lose critical ruling

That said, if you saw whole newspaper articles written without kana, then no, that would have been Chinese, not Japanese.

Answer 2

No. It is not possible to write standard Modern Japanese in kanji only. You may see newspaper headlines without kana particles but that is an artificial use of orthography to save space on the page. Headlines do not reflect grammatical or syntactic norms within the language itself.

Historically, there was a time when only kanji were used. When kanji were first borrowed from Chinese, different reading systems were used experimentally, including a system in which only kanji were used. However, this created difficulties for readers, especially when trying to represent verbal inflexions and grammatical particles. For example, the particle には used to be written as 庭 (niwa), but such usage requires the reader to understand that in this case, the kanji character is to be used only phonetically and not for its meaning. Ultimately, this and other attempts proved too cumbersome and the issue was only resolved with the ongoing evolution of kana. From then onwards, the so-called 'mixed writing' was adopted and has become standard. In fact, you cannot write Japanese without including kana to represent particles, verb endings, okurigana, honorifics, etc.

Answer 3

If you saw that the newspaper had only Chinese characters (specifically, no hiragana or katakana), you are likely looking at a Chinese newspaper. Modern Japanese has used hiragana in the newspaper for at least 70 years (likely longer).

This wikipedia page gives an (extremely) brief history of hiragana, but it appears to have been around since AD 500. Hiragana wasn't officially formalized into the system until much after the 500's, but you may be hard pressed to find a date.

The fact that the hiragana system was reformed in 1900* suggests to me that its appearance in newspapers could date until 1900, if not earlier. The appearance of a standard Kanji list in 1946 (Tōyō kanji) indicates to me that use of hiragana in newspapers was at least formalized at around the same time.

_{*The wikipedia article on script reform may be more what you are looking for in terms of information. I highly suggest you give it a look.}

Answer 4

Kanji in Japanese is ideographic, meaning that each character has a set meaning. As such, it is possible to string several together to get larger words with greater nuance.... This Stack Exchange talks about long Japanese words:

What is the longest word in Japanese?

Notice, however, in one of the examples on that page, that the long English word "antidisestablishmentarianism" cannot simply be rendered with kanji, in Japanese (英国国教会の廃止に反対する主義). This is because the Japanese explanation of the concept includes a possession marker, a preposition and a verb, all of which involve the use of hiragana.

The Japanese language needs these hiragana portions to represent verb conjugations, and to denote movement/placement/relationship, etc... So if you saw a string of PURE kanji, it is likely to be a singular name or idea, not a fully formed sentence or a complete thought.

Chinese, on the other hand, IS written completely with hanzi (the Chinese version of kanji), so it is possible you saw a clip from a Chinese newspaper being discussed on a Japanese show.