Japenese marks remind me of logos rather than letters. I agree that they are beautiful, organic and very expressive. Have you thought about studying Japanese? Learning how to write this way will influence they way you look at your own writing and how you dot each “i” and cross each “t”. Japanese culture is quite amazing and the design coming from this part of the world is exploding. Have you seen the magazine IDEA or looked at the work of Tadanori Yokoo, http://www.tadanoriyokoo.com/ You can see some of his stop animation (where he uses still imagery) to make videos, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wYALOq22QE.

I have this japanese poster hanging outside of my office (see below.) I was told it was a Japanese announcement for a Sumo Wrestling Tournament. The bigger the name means the bigger the Sumo wrestler.

As you can see, I love Japanese design and think it is beautiful as well.

I agree. I love Japanese writing so much. I studied Japanese in high school for 2 years and it was so amazing to see how the formation of the characters are created. The only problem with Japanese writing is doing it correctly. There is a specific stroke order that the character is supposed to be written. That to me is the most difficult part of learning Japanese as well as learning all the characters. Learning Japanese does make you realize the beauty in creating fluid movement in whatever you create.

I actually have been doing Japanese and Korean martial arts for the last thirteen years (on and off). This kind of put me in a position to immerse myself in the cultures and also pick up a nominal bit of the spoken language.For the most part, I’ve come to understand how it is organized and the concept for the writing of characters. I completely agree that it more resembles logos rather that text because that is exactly what each character is.
The rudementary basis for character writing, in ancient times, was basically a drawing of an idea that a person was trying to convey.Throughout the years the written aspect of the language has become slightly more simplified, in which they have now incorperated a phonetic alphabet. If you’re looking at Kanji though, it is a bunch of different logos.

I put this atatchment up to better explain. Notice the older, ancient writing which is at the top, and the Kanji, or written language at the bottom. If you notice, the written language actually represents the pictogram in shape, look close.

by the way...that’s a bird, a chicken, tortise, and a fish

I’ve been studying Japanese for three years now, and before I began I had the same sort of attitude towards the lettering. It was beautiful and artistic. But, as I started to put a meaning to the symbols, it completely lost the beauty it held in my eyes. For me, it became no more unique than writing an A or a B, but more time-consuming.

The two basic writing forms, Hiragana and Katakana, are far simpler than kanji, of course, but at this point I’ve even started to dissect kanji into their basic elements.

As CSGilmor pointed out, the kanji are basically simplified pictograms, and the example my teacher used the first day of class was kuruma, or car which looks like this: 車. With a little imagination, this looks like a simplified picture of a cart from above. Imagine the vertical line as the wheel axle and go from there. With more advanced study, it’s also fascinating to start picking out the elements that tie the kanji together by concept.

For example, 語 (go) means language, 話す (hanasu) means speak*, and 詩 (shi) means poem. In addition, they can be combined with different characters to form other words such as “literature,” “composition,” and “linguistics.” The three kanji are related by a relatively abstract concept of communication through words, but they all begin with the same strokes which make up itte, to say: 言って. On a whole different front, the symbol for 5 (pronounced “go”) is 五 and can be found in the upper right of “go” as in language.

Japanese is a fascinating language, and I encourage anyone interested to study it. You may no longer be able to see the “prettyness,” of a block of text, but there are far more fascinating subtleties in the language just beneath the surface.

For better views of the kanji, please click here. I would include the image here, but as I’m new here I can’t figure out how.

* as in “I speak Japanese.”

Again, just like everything else, the Japanese out do the rest of the world in almost everything....Even in the culture’s most simplest form of communication, they make it beautiful...

Kanjis are Chinese, not Japanese (roughly: kan = Chinese, ji = characters).

It’s true the the kanji are originally Chinese characters, but in modern times they’re as much a part of the Japanese language as the Chinese. In Chinese, the kanji almost always have different readings and meanings, however.

The basis of Kanji is Chinese. However, the kanji was adopted by the Japanese in 57ad during the Han dynasty. Kanji holds the basic principals of Japanese writing.The actual translation of Kanji in Japanese results in “Han”, relating to the Han dynasty.

Kanji is fascinating. I’ve been using the Nintendo DS: there are a lot of great Kanji learning apps available for it.