Until the 5th century BC, Japan had no written language. Around 550 they started to use Chinese Kanji symbols to represent spoken Japanese. Here are some examples of Chinese Kanji - which are ideograms: each symbol has its own meaning and can create more words when combined with other symbols. There are close to 40,000 symbols but if you learn around 3,000 of them you can read a newspaper.
Around 900 BC another form of Japanese script called Hiragana was introduced to create words that were not represented by Chinese Kanji. Hiragana consists of 46 symbols which represent syllables that can be combined in different ways to create words. The first five shown represent the vowels A, E, I, O and U and the rest are consonants.
Then, to make it even more complicated, another 46-syllable script called Katakana was introduced to write words loaned from other languages like English, Dutch, French, etc.
So, a sentence written in Japanese may contain a combination of all three: Kanji, Katakana and Hirakana! Makes my head spin. It does, however, explain why the Pingles can so easily make her way around Tokyo - she can read the Mandarin Kanji and know what's going on.
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