Japanese has three different kinds of scripts, but the bulk of written Japanese uses kanji, characters borrowed from Chinese. Kanji are logograms—each character represents a word or idea. Though the character’s shape may provide a clue to its meaning, for the most part kanji simply have to be memorized; they cannot be “sounded out.” And kanji are not written on lines. Instead, Emiko told Barrie how in Japan their paper did not have lines but dozens of square boxes. (The paper is called genkō yōshi, and is still used in Japanese schools today.) Each kanji acted independently; each was perfectly
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