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I was wondering if anyone could tell me when furigana started being used in
Japan? I'm writing a research paper, and I've been searching and digging
around for the answer but can't find it anywhere.
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question
history furigana
At what time did furigana start being used?
**Short answer** : In the words of Ariga, they're "as old as writing itself".¹

**Long answer** :

You might be surprised to learn that furigana is _older than hiragana_!

To understand what I mean by that, we'll have to make a digression first into
what kana even _means_. The first thing to keep in mind is that the Japanese
didn't invent the use of characters to write sounds. From the very beginning,
the Chinese have been using their kanji characters to write sounds, too, just
like _kana_. For example, the character 阿 originally denoted the Chinese word
_"a"_ , meaning "large mound"; but it was often used to denote the sound _a_
itself, not just large mounds—for example, when representing the Sanskrit name
of the Celestial Buddha Amitābha, written in Chinese as 阿弥陀佛 * _a-mi-tuo-but_.
The sound "a" could also be represented as 安, 亜, 悪 and several others. We call
these **phonograms**. A phonogram is a kanji like any other, but it's being
used to represent the sound only, discarding the meaning. Theoretically any
kanji could be used as a phonogram, but for reasons that are easy to imagine,
a few hundred kanji (like 阿) became especially associated with phonogram
usage.

When writing was introduced in Japan, at first it was used to write Chinese,
not Japanese. But even in this stage, the Japanese had the problem of how to
write down certain Japanese words, such as personal names or place names. What
they did was of course to take the already-existing phonograms and use them to
represent Japanese sounds. These days people call these phonograms
_Man'yōgana_ , after the classical poetic anthology _Man'yōshū_ ; but the
Japanese already used them way before the _Man'yōgana_ , and it has been
shown² that they used pretty much the same set of phonograms as their Chinese
source, with a few Koreanisms thrown in (which makes sense because, as the
Japanese themselves tell us in the _Kojiki_ and _Nihon Shoki_ , they learned
writing from Korean masters). For example, here's a section from the
[Inariyama sword](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inariyama_Sword), though to
date around 513CE:³

[![Section of 6c Japanese Inariyama sword showing inscription:
獲加多支鹵大王](https://i.stack.imgur.com/M3IM3.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/M3IM3.png)  
(Credits: [風来香 blog](http://hirohabe.cocolog-
nifty.com/tiger/2011/12/post-4143.html).)

Though written in Chinese as was the norm, this sword has a long list of
Japanese names written in phonograms. The section above shows the characters
獲加多支鹵大王, phonograms for わかたきろ-大王, some Great King Waka Takiro.³ Around the 8th
century, the same technique would be used to record full Japanese poems in the
_Kojiki_ (written in Chinese but with Japanese quotations), and increasingly
for Japanese in general.

(What were phonograms called back then? Well, they were "borrowed names", or…
仮名 _kana_. The word was opposed to "true names" 真名 _mana_ , or kanji used for
meaning. Note that, at this stage, kana weren't considered to be different
characters than kanji; only different ways of _using_ the same characters.)

Let's look at a page of one of the oldest surviving manuscripts of that
_Kojiki_ , the oldest text (ca. 712) with Japanese literature in it. This is
from the Dōka copy, ca. 1381 (courtesy of
[kojiki.org](http://www.kojiki.org/douka/index.htm)):

[![次天之常立神\(訓常云登許訓立云多知\)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OJavr.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OJavr.png)

We have a normal section in Chinese-style, 次天之常立神; but then comes a curious
note in smaller type, 訓常云登許訓立云多知—set in two columns, just like the Chinese did
in their tradition of commentaries and annotations. This isn't something
invented by this manuscript only; all Kojikis we have do this, and the author
describes what's he's doing in the preface, so we know it's part of the
original work. What's going on with it? This sentence starts, like much of the
_Kojiki_ , introducing a deity: next (次), comes the Heavenly… 天之{あまの}…
something-or-other-no-Kami 神. The author then tells us how to read the hard
part in the middle, that is, the core name of the god: use a Japanese _kun_ 訓
reading for ‹常›, 云=pronouncing it as _toko_ (glossed in phonograms, 登 _to_ 許
_ko_ ). Then use another _kun_ 訓 for ‹立›, 云 pronouncing as _tachi_ (in
phonograms, 多 _ta_ 知 _chi_ ). We can finally read the god's Japanese name:
[Ama-no-toko-tachi-no-
Kami](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A9%E4%B9%8B%E5%B8%B8%E7%AB%8B%E7%A5%9E).¹

This is, in most ways that matter, the first Japanese book, and it has
_furigana_.

Though the above are the same as _furigana_ in function (they're a phonetic
notation on how to read _kanji_ , distinguished from the main text in smaller
type), they're still not quite the same in form (they follow the text as
instructions, rather than being parallel with it). Modern furigana are a type
of **interlinear gloss** , a "writing between the lines" (or columns). These
also have precedent outside Japan, but to avoid even more digressions, let's
skip to the part where Buddhist priests put two and two together and started
using interlinear glosses to help with reading holy texts aloud. Buddhists in
particular cared a lot about that, because 1) they wanted to instruct novices
in Buddhism and spread it as efficiently as possible, and 2) they believed
that preserving the proper enunciation of the mantras was important for them
to be effective.⁴

So you see, Japanese Buddhist monks studying classics in Chinese had all the
tools and all the motives to gloss the pronunciation of kanji using
phonograms, and that's what they did:³

[![Some Abidatsuma
phonograms](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aWqfu.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aWqfu.png)

This table lists some phonograms used side-by-side with kanji, like modern
furigana, in the Buddhist text 阿毘達磨雑集論 _Abidatsuma Zōjūron_ (ca. 800). I'm
only quoting the ones with an _-a_ vowel for brevity; see the references for
more. (Similar developments in phonogram notation took place in Korea, too⁵).
Did you spot our friend the phonogram 阿 in the title of the text? _Abidatsuma_
阿毘達磨 is a transcript of the Sanskrit word
_[Abhidharma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhidharma)_ , a kind of religious
text. And, as we might have expected, 阿 is listed in the table as a furigana
for the sound _a_ in the manuscript, too (in a somewhat decayed shape).
Unfortunately I couldn't find online images of the manuscript (if anyone has
access to relevant materials, please post them!).

But wait: something's off here. Symbols like 和 for _wa_ or 万 for _ma_ are
clearly phonographic kanji as described, but others look like pretty much like
modern katakana. We've seen in the _Kojiki_ that the character 多 was used for
_ta_ , for example, but here in the _Abidatsuma_ it's been reduced to a single
タ – our modern katakana for it. And the one for _ya_ looks less like its
putative kanji, 也, than the modern hiragana や. What happened?

This is the final piece of the puzzle: **graphical simplification**. If you've
ever tried to draw characters with a brush, you know the ungodly amount of
work that is to draw a lot of them. If you're writing cute Japanese words like
_Ama-no-tsune-tachi-no-kami_ with full-blown kanji phonograms, you'll be
sitting there the entire day (in fact the author of the _Kojiki_ famously
complains about that in the preface; it's the reason he gives for using
convoluted _kun_ readings, like writing _ama-_ "heavenly" as 天, rather than
just writing everything as phonograms, like 阿万). But the difficulties of
drawing too many strokes didn't afflict just the Japanese, and Chinese writing
already had its own solution to draw things more easily: the same we had in
Western handwriting, that is, cursive. Here's an extract of a cursive piece by
a celebrated Chinese calligrapher, Wang Xizhi (303–361; image via [the
met](http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39899)):

[![Wang cursive
\(extract\)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/o0ACC.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/o0ACC.png)

Notice how this piece conveniently portrays one Chinese use of interlinear
glosses. Does the flowing style feel familiar? I'm sure you must have noticed
that あ is just a cursive 安, which had always been a common phonogram for _a_ ,
and 也→や, too, is clearly recognizable. If you're not convinced of how are
these shapes related, watching them [in
movement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlB2JmolzTk) should make it clear.

These simplified forms lend themselves naturally to phonogram use, because
they're so convenient, and phonogram is so verbose. I've been glossing (heh)
over this, but there's been a tendency from the beginning to use simplified
shapes for phonograms. One of the Japanese innovations was the gradual
_specialization_ of ultra-cursive forms to phonogram use, mixing them with
fuller characters meant to be read by meaning. This is unlike Chinese in that
now there was a clear visual indicator of how each character should be read:
if they're ultra-cursive, read as phonograms. This is hiragana.

As we said, quick-and-dirty hiragana was a natural fit for furigana glosses,
as in や in the _Abidatsuma_ table above, or the bottom one in the _ka_ list (;
it looks like a の with an accent, but it's actually an old cursive version of
the phonogram 可 _ka_ ). There emerged also a second method of simplifying
characters, associated with Buddhist glossing: just straightforwardly
abbreviate them. Draw only the first two strokes of 阿, giving ア, or half of 多
for タ, or half of 加 for カ, and so on. Both kinds of simplified characters
became specialized for phonogram use, in no small part thanks to their role as
_furigana_ glosses for kanji. In fact, you might have spotted a normal
furigana ト already in the Dōka Kojiki manuscript shown above—this wouldn't be
as old as the original Kojiki, but it's still pretty damn old; by the Heian
period modern-style furigana can already be found in manuscripts… about at the
same time as one finds modern-style kanji/kana Japanese text.

What I wanted to show with all this exposition was that all the ingredients
were there from the start: kanji, phonograms, annotations, glosses, simplified
shapes, all predate the introduction of writing to Japan and have parallels
elsewhere. And the particular system they formed in Japan evolved organically,
and organized itself naturally; _furigana_ , _okurigana_ and the very
_hiragana/katakana_ themselves, all of it happened together as a coherent
whole.

References:

  1. Ariga, [_The Playful Gloss_](http://www.jstor.org/stable/2384611).
  2. Bentley, [_The Origin of Man'yogana_](http://www.jstor.org/stable/3657541).
  3. Seeley, _A History of Writing in Japan_.
  4. De Boer, [_The Historical Development of Japanese Tone_](http://www.academia.edu/9659321/The_historical_development_of_Japanese_tone_Part_1_From_proto-Japanese_to_the_modern_dialects_Part_2_The_introduction_and_adaptation_of_the_Middle_Chinese_tones_in_Japan).
  5. Whitman, [_The Ubiquity of the Gloss_](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5f57/484ccebc6c1414d4f94f2fdfc100b4c4d15a.pdf).
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