The Samurai - Everyday Life in Traditional Japan - page 43

graces of traditional ritual, as in flower-arrangement and the tea ceremony, and of dance,
song, and the playing of the koto, the horizontal harp. They would learn to write, in the
flowing Japanese style rather than the stiff Chinese Calligraphy, and to read the classical
Japanese novels and poetry, even though some moralists condemned the eleventh-century
Tale of Genji, now recognised to be the masterpiece of Japanese novel-writing, as liable to
put licentious thoughts into chaste heads.
For boys, things were quite different, but an account of their schools, and what was
taught in them must be preceded by some explanation of the nature of the Japanese lan-
guage and its relation to Chinese. Japanese is, in vocabulary and grammar, quite differ-
ent from Chinese, but it had no native form of writing. The Chinese language was im-
ported along with various other aspects of Chinese civilization and the Buddhist religion,
in the sixth and seventh centuries. Later, Chinese characters were used to write Japan-
ese. However, the Chinese language, for the writing of which they were developed, has,
for example, no grammatical endings to its words, and gets its effects purely by combina-
tionsofthese characters, which areintrinsically expressions ofmeaning; whereas Japanese
has complicated grammatical endings, and to express these, and other elements, it had to
use Chinese characters purely for their sound. The dual system thus arose of expressing a
Japanese word either by a character that had the approximate meaning required, or by the
charactersusedphonetically,orbyacombinationofthetwo.Inthecourseoftimethechar-
acters used phonetically developed into a relatively simple syllabary (in which a symbol
expresses a vowel or combination of consonant and vowel), and Japanese thus came to be
written in a mixture of characters and phonetic symbols. When writing Japanese, one ten-
ded to use a cursive style, that is, one in which the characters and symbols assumed abbre-
viated and flowing forms. When writing Chinese, one used square characters, comparable
to block capitals in the alphabet ( 27 ) .
One of the fundamental aims at the schools for samurai boys was the teaching of how
to read Chinese texts, using the conventional devices, such as reading the characters in a
different order from that in which they appeared in the text, and adding grammatical end-
ings, so that they sounded like a very stilted Japanese. The texts were the Chinese classics
and works of Confucian ethics, and their content formed the typical samurai mind, with
the value it placed on loyalty to superiors, the need for decorum, and a strong feeling of
superiority to those who were not samurai. The teaching of calligraphy was also of great
importance, and lastly, the rules of etiquette— how to behave towards one's superiors ac-
cording to their rank, as well as manners to be observed at mealtimes, correct posture and
so on—were inculcated, together with a grounding in the use of weapons.