Before the 5th century, the Japanese had no writing system of their own. They began to adopt the Chinese writing script along with many other aspects of Chinese culture after their introduction by Korean monks and scholars during the 5th and 6th centuries AD.

At first, the Japanese wrote in Classical Chinese, or in a mixture of Chinese, used both ideographically, phonetically, and otherwise to create Japanese meanings. An example of this mixed style is the Kojiki, which was written in 712 AD. They then started to use Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as man'yōgana, a ten thousand syllabic script which used characters depicting their own values.

A mix of english and japanese advertising in Akihabara

Over time, a writing system was constructed. Chinese characters (kanji) were used to write either words borrowed from Chinese, or Japanese words with the same or similar meanings. Chinese characters were also used to write grammatical elements, were simplified, and eventually became two syllabic scripts: hiragana and katakana.

Japanese literature reached a high point during the 11th century with the Genji Monogatari ("Tale of Genji") by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Many other Japanese literary works were also written by women.

Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Japanese texts may also include rōmaji (letters from the Latin alphabet) as well as various special symbols.