Over many centuries, Japan adapted Chinese characters to suit the needs and form of the Japanese language. But to some, these foreign kanji remained a dirty smear on an otherwise pure Japanese culture. Of course, Japanese is no less diminished by Chinese characters than English is by Latin letters or Hindu-Arabic numerals. But, for believers in the superiority and perfection of Japanese culture, kanji raised an uncomfortable question: how could Japan never have devised its own ‘native’ writing system?

In kamiyo moji, these nativists found a mythical Japanese script. One that, like the Emperor, had a lineage stretching back to the heavens. These letterforms fit a view of the Japanese language as sacred and Chinese characters as vulgar and profane. These spirit scripts could be used to literally re-write history.

Not all scholars accepted the scripts when they were revealed. Some said that the ancestors had not bothered with written language because they had no need for it. They argued that the ancient Japanese ‘had no need to store in static characters the truth they encountered and appreciated every day.’¹ This may reveal a profound wisdom of ancient Japan. But these scholars were still arguing against the ink of foreign letterforms fouling the pure wellspring of Japanese culture. For them, the introduction of kanji meant that ‘words no longer expressed the direct experience of things. Words were no longer a transparent medium, as they had been in the original Japanese language.’²

Kamiyo moji gained renewed prominence when they were promoted by nationalists in the 19th and 20th Centuries. At the same time, a similar campaign was being waged against ‘foreign’ Buddhism in favour of the native religion Shintō. Some forty thousand Buddhist temples were destroyed in a wave of nationalist fervour in the late 1800s.