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In English it's normal for the sentence to start with a capital letter. In
German also. Additionally, there are classes of words that are written in
German with an initial capital letter.

How is it in Japanese for:

  * Hiragana
  * Katakana
  * Kanji
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kanji katakana orthography hiragana
Does Japanese have characters in small size and in capital size?
Not many scripts/alphabets have two "cases" like the Latin script does. The
Latin (English, German, French, ...), Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, ...),
Greek and Armenian scripts have cases ([Indo-European
languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages)), but most
other scripts are [unicase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicase).

  * [Quora - What are the languages that have both capital letters and lowercase letters? Other than English?](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-languages-that-have-both-capital-letters-and-lowercase-letters-Other-than-English)

Japanese has two different phonetic alphabets (hiragana and katakana), but
neither is "upper" nor "lower". They are used depending on the type of the
word. For example, インターネット (the katakana word for _Internet_ ) is written like
this, in all katakana, regardless of its position in a sentence. イ is always イ
regardless of its position in a word. There is no such thing as
"uppercase/lowercase kanji", either.

Some hiragana/katakana do have [small
versions](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/44342/5010), but their role is
close to that of Latin diacritics. Small hiragana/katakana basically indicate
a variation of the sound of the previous character. Just as Ü is a variation
of U in German, ティ is a variation of テ in Japanese (note that イ is small).
This is very different from the concept of uppercase/lowercase or [small
caps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_caps) in English.

You can read an introduction of the [Japanese writing
system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system) on Wikipedia.
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answer