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 From around 2,000 BC, when written characters were first being used in the Hwang Ho (Yellow River) region of China, until the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, the Japanese language appears to have existed only in spoken form.
The Chinese and Koreans who journeyed to Japan during this period introduced a form of writing that used Han Period (206 BC - 220 AD) characters. This square printed writing style, or Kaisho, which prototypes today's modern Kanji, was established around 200 AD, and used upwards of 50,000 characters. Between the 6th to the 9th century, Japanese borrowed numerous Chinese characters to express the Japan's oral language in writing.
The earliest writing systems of both East and West were pictographs; small pictures that represented ideas. In the West, some of these pictographs were simplified to represent the "sounds" of the spoken language, which led to the evolution of phonetic alphabets and dictionaries. In China, the use of pictographs has remained relatively intact with few changes to this day. In modern Japan however, both methods coexist in a single written language, which is arguably the most complex script in use today.
Japanese is written with a combination of three different scripts (four if you count the Roman alphabet, which is also used intermixed with the other three): in the form of four separate writing systems: Kanji (Chinese pictographic characters) is used to represent ideas or objects, Hiragana is used to express the grammatical relationships between ideas and objects, Katakana is used for foreign words, and Romaji uses the Roman alphabet to write Japanese for foreigners.
Kanji (Chinese characters borrowed from China and incorporated in the Japanese language) is what makes Japanese a difficult language to learn. Unlike Hiragana and Katakana, each of which contain 46 simple characters, there are literally tens of thousands of Kanji, some of which are still used in China.
There are at least two ways of pronouncing each Kanji (one is a native Japanese reading and the other is the original Chinese reading). Most have between four and six different pronunciations. As any Chinese character can in principle be a Japanese Kanji, as late as World War II some Japanese dictionaries listed as many as 50,000 Kanji. Before 1946, Japanese needed to know some 4,000 Kanji in order to read newspapers and magazines!
To simplify the process of learning Kanji, the Japanese Ministry of Education created a short list of 1,945 Kanji characters called Jôyô Kanji, the Kanji for everyday life. Most Japanese newspapers and magazines limit themselves to using Jôyô Kanji. There is complementary group of 284 Kanji used for writing personal and place names.
Japanese children begin learning Kanji in the first grade and by the time they reach the sixth grade, they have learned 1,006 characters. The remaining 939 characters are learned before a student graduates from high school.
If you're wondering how many Kanji you must know in order to be proficient in Japanese, consider that learning the 200 most used Kanji (most of which are taught in the first and second grade) will allow you to read many simple phrases in Japanese and get a feeling for the meaning of several words.
If you learn the 1,006 Kanji taught by the sixth grade, you could read most of any Japanese magazine or newspaper. Even if you define "proficient" as having the same reading abilities as a native educated Japanese, take note that even some Japanese people can remember all readings for all Kanji - particularly those used in names of people and places.
You need not learn all 1,945 characters of Jôyô Kanji with all their individual and combined readings, but the more you learn, the better you will understand the written language. Trying to learn the Japanese language without learning Kanji is pointless.
The adaptation of Kanji to write the Japanese language did not come without difficulty. The multiple syllables and inflections of the language could not be easily expressed with a writing system devised for the single-syllable Chinese language. Since Chinese lacked inflected items such as verb suffixes (eg. -tion, -ish, -ed), Japanese verbs had to be expressed by using a primary Chinese character followed by other secondary Kanji that represented the verb's variable ending. Combining a Chinese character with semantic meaning and Kanji with only a phonetic meaning created a great deal of confusion.
By the ninth century, the Japanese had simplified their phonetic Kanji into two standardized and parallel phonetic syllabaries known collectively as Kana, a term that literally means "assumed names". The characters that define Katakana and Hiragana evolved from Chinese characters of the same sound, but devoid of semantic meaning and each Kana character defines an entire Japanese syllable.
Katakana (literally "side script"), the first of the Kana syllabaries, was invented by Kibi no Makibi (693-755 AD) by simplifying a single element or radical from each of the phonetic Kanji. This angular script was initially used as a pronunciation guide for reading Buddhist scriptures. In modern times however, the 46 Katakana are commonly used to write foreign "loan words" (foreign words brought into Japanese) and to express emphasis in a way similar to the English use of italic script. The Japanese also use Katakana to write onomatopoeic words, words whose meaning is their own sound, for some Japanese personal names (specially female names), and when representation must be done with a simple set of characters (e.g. LCD displays of small devices).
The Buddhist priest Kūkai (774 - 835) invented Hiragana as a simplification of the phonetic Kanji in the same way as each Katakana symbol, except that the Hiragana were simplified from the entire Kanji. This cursive script virtually created Heian literature in the period from 794 to 1185, the Age of Peace and Tranquility. At the time, Japanese women were considered incapable of learning to write the complex Chinese characters. The introduction of Hiragana enabled women to finally express themselves in writing. In fact, the first published works in Japan were written by women.
Hiragana is primarily used to write native Japanese words not expressed by Kanji. The 46 Hiragana symbols are also used to write verb endings and adjectives, particles of speech, and other grammatical constructions. When looking at Japanese text, you can clearly distinguish between two character styles: the elaborate Kanji and the simpler Kana. Japanese children, who already have a command of the spoken language, learn Hiragana writing first. As they learn more Kanji, their use of Hiragana shifts more toward its intended application, writing verb and adjective endings and those native words for which there are no Kanji. In those cases where a student is learning the pronunciation of new Kanji or where an adult speaker may not understand an uncommon reading of a Chinese character, Hiragana script is written above the Kanji or on the right hand side as an aid.
The Romaji are Roman characters similar to those in Western alphabets that are used mainly to represent Japanese syllables in non-Japanese characters. The numbers 0, 1, 2, ...9 are also considered Romaji. Although it is entirely possible to write Japanese in Romaji, it is not all that useful for learning to read and speak Japanese. Its greatest application is in the transliteration of Japanese for use in the Western world. While there are several methods of changing the Kana and Kanji into Romaji, the system generally considered a standard in the English-speaking world is the Hepburn Romanization System, named after the Reverend James Curtis Hepburn. It is known in Japanese as Hebon-shiki.
A more modern application of Romaji is its use as part of the character input system for computers and electronic devices. The user simply types the desired phrase in romaji which is then converted to Kana and Kanji. Romaji is also used as a form of identification (cards, business logos, acronyms etc.), to write signs readable by foreign visitors (station names, some place names), and to create product names. Almost all cars (including Japanese models) have their model name plates in Romaji even if the name is Japanese in origin (ex. Subaru).
There you have it. The Japanese have one native language, but write it using three different scripts. Furthermore, Japanese writing can use all three scripts simultaneously! In a typical sentence, nouns are written in Kanji while subjects and verbs are written in Hiragana and Katakana. Romaji is used only when something needs to be communicated to foreigners. Consider the following sentence written in Romaji.
Watashi wa Kenshu Senta de Nihon-go o benkyo-shimasu
"I study Japanese at the Kenshu Center"
In this single sentence, "Watashi wa" will be written in Hiragana, "Kenshu" in Kanji, "Senta" in Katakana, "de" in Hiragana, "Nihon-go" in Kanji, "o" in Hiragana, "benkyo" in Kanji, and "shimasu" in Hiragana.
Consider this small essay just the tip of the iceberg.
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