Kanbun (漢文 'Han writing') is a system for writing Literary Chinese used in Japan from the Nara period until the 20th century. Much of Japanese literature was written in this style and it was the general writing style for official and intellectual works throughout the period. As a result, Sino-Japanese vocabulary makes up a large portion of the Japanese lexicon and much classical Chinese literature is accessible to Japanese readers in some resemblance of the original.

The Japanese writing system originated through adoption and adaptation of written Chinese. Some of Japan's oldest books (e.g. the Nihon Shoki) and dictionaries (e.g. the Tenrei Banshō Meigi and Wamyō Ruijushō) were written in kanbun. Other Japanese literary genres have parallels; the Kaifūsō is the oldest collection of kanshi (漢詩, 'Chinese poetry'). Burton Watson's English translations of kanbun compositions provide an introduction to this literary field.^[1][2]

Samuel Martin coined the term Sino-Xenic in 1953 to describe Chinese as written in Japan, Korea, and other foreign (hence -xenic) zones on China's periphery.^[3] Roy Andrew Miller notes that although Japanese kanbun conventions have Sino-Xenic parallels with other traditions for reading Literary Chinese like Korean hanmun and Vietnamese Hán Văn, only kanbun has survived to the present day.^[4] He explains how

in the Japanese kanbun reading tradition a Chinese text is simultaneously punctuated, analyzed, and translated into classical Japanese. It operates according to a limited canon of Japanese forms and syntactic structures which are treated as existing in a one-to-one alignment with the vocabulary and structures of classical Chinese. At its worst, this system for reading Chinese as if it were Japanese became a kind of lazy schoolboy's trot to a classical text; at its best, it has preserved the analysis and interpretation of large body of literary Chinese texts which would otherwise have been completely lost; hence, the kanbun tradition can often be of great value for an understanding of early Chinese literature.

William C. Hannas points out the linguistic hurdles involved in kanbun transformation.^[5]

Kanbun, literally "Chinese writing," refers to a genre of techniques for making Chinese texts read like Japanese, or for writing in a way imitative of Chinese. For a Japanese, neither of these tasks could be accomplished easily because of the two languages' different structures. As I have mentioned, Chinese is an isolating language. Its grammatical relations are identified in subject–verb–object (SVO) order and through the use of particles similar to English prepositions. Inflection plays no role in the grammar. Morphemes are typically one syllable in length and combine to form words without modification to their phonetic structures (tone excepted). Conversely, the basic structure of a transitive Japanese sentence is SOV, with the usual syntactic features associated with languages of this typology, including post positions, that is, grammar particles that appear after the words and phrases to which they apply.

He lists four major Japanese problems: word order, parsing which Chinese characters should be read together, deciding how to pronounce the characters, and finding suitable equivalents for Chinese function words.

According to John Timothy Wixted, scholars have disregarded kanbun.^[6]

In terms of its size, often its quality, and certainly its importance both at the time it was written and cumulatively in the cultural tradition, kanbun is arguably the biggest and most important area of Japanese literary study that has been ignored in recent times, and the one least properly represented as part of the canon.

A new development in kanbun studies is the Web-accessible database being developed by scholars at Nishogakusha University in Tokyo.^{[7][clarification needed]}

The Japanese word kanbun originally meant 'Literary Chinese writings'—or, the Chinese classics.^[8] Kanbun compositions used two common types of Japanese kanji readings: Sino-Japanese on'yomi ('pronunciation readings') borrowed from Chinese pronunciations and native Japanese kun'yomi 'explanation readings' from Japanese equivalents. For example, 道 can be read as dō adapted from Middle Chinese /dấw/^[9] or as michi from the indigenous Japanese word meaning 'road'.

Kanbun implemented two particular types of kana. One was okurigana 'accompanying script', kana suffixes added to kanji stems to show their Japanese readings; the other was furigana 'brandishing script', smaller kana syllables written alongside kanji to indicate pronunciation. These were used primarily as reinforcements to writing in kanbun. Kanbun—as opposed to Wabun (和文, 'Wa writing'), Japanese text with Japanese syntax and predominately kun'yomi readings—is divided into several types:

jun-kanbun (純漢文, 'genuine Chinese writing')

Chinese text written with Chinese syntax and on'yomi characters

hakubun (白文, 'blank writing')

Kanbun without reading aids or punctuation

Wakan konkō-bun

Sino-Japanese composition written with Japanese syntax and mixed on'yomi and kun'yomi readings

hentai-kanbun (変体漢文, 'variant form Chinese writing')

Chinese modified with Japanese syntax, a "Japan-ized" version of Literary Chinese

Jean-Noël Robert describes kanbun as a "perfectly frozen, 'dead'" language that was continuously used from the late Heian period (794–1185) until after World War II:^[10]

Classical Chinese, which, as we have seen, had long since ceased to be a spoken language on the mainland (if indeed it had ever been), has been in use in the Japanese archipelago longer than the Japanese language itself. The oldest written remnants found in Japan are all in Chinese, though it is a matter of considerable debate whether traces of the Japanese vernacular are to be found in them. Taking both languages together until the end of the nineteenth century, and taking into account all the monastic documents, literature in the widest sense of the term, and texts in 'near-Chinese' (hentai-kanbun), it is entirely possible that the sheer volume of texts written in Chinese in Japan slightly exceed what was written in Japanese.

As Literary Chinese originally lacked punctuation, the kanbun tradition developed various conventional reading punctuation, diacritical, and syntactic markers.

kunten (訓点, 'explanation mark')

Guiding marks for rendering Chinese into Japanese

kundoku (訓読, 'explanation reading')

The Japanese reading of a kanji

kanbun kundoku (漢文訓読, 'Chinese writing Japanese reading')

A Japanese reading of a Chinese passage

okototen (乎古止点, 'inflectional dot marks')

Diacritical dots on characters to indicate Japanese grammatical inflections

kutōten (句読点, 'phrase reading marks')

Punctuation marks analogous to commas and full stops

kaeriten (返り点, 'return marker')

Marks placed alongside characters indicating their Japanese ordering is to be read in reverse

Kaeriten grammatically transforms Literary Chinese into Japanese word order. Two are syntactic symbols, the | tatesen (縦線, 'vertical bar')—linking mark that denotes phrases composed of more than one character, and the レ reten (レ点, '[katakana] re mark')^[11] denotes 'reverse marks'. The rest are kanji commonly used in numbering and ordering systems:

• Four numerals: ichi 一 'one', ni 二 'two', san 三 'three', and yon 四 'four'
• Three locatives: ue 上 'top', naka 中 'middle', and shita 下 'bottom'
• Four Heavenly Stems: kinoe 甲 'first', kinoto 乙 'second', hinoe 丙 'third', and hinoto 丁 'fourth'^[11][12]
• Three cosmological sansai (三才, 'three worlds'), see Wakan Sansai Zue: ten 天 'heaven', chi 地 'earth', and jin 人 'person'. For written English, these kaeriten would correspond with 1, 2, 3; I, II, III; A, B, C, etc.

As an analogy for kanbun changing the word order from Chinese sentences with subject–verb–object (SVO) into Japanese subject–object–verb (SOV), John DeFrancis gives this example of using a literal English translation—another SVO language—of the opening of the Latin-language Commentarii de Bello Gallico.^[13]

DeFrancis adds, "A better analogy would be the reverse situation–Caesar rendering an English text in his native language and adding Latin case endings."^[14]

Two English textbooks for students of kanbun are An Introduction to Kambun by Sydney Crawcour,^[15] reviewed by Marian Ury in 1990,^[16] and An Introduction to Japanese Kanbun by Komai and Rohlich, reviewed by Andrew Markus in 1990^[17] and Wixted^{[further explanation needed]} in 1998.^[18]

The illustration to the right exemplifies kanbun. These eight words comprise the well-known first line in the Han Feizi story (ch. 36) that first coined the term máodùn (Japanese mujun, 矛盾 'contradiction, inconsistency', lit. "spear-shield"^[8]), illustrating the irresistible force paradox. Debating with a Confucianist about the legendary Chinese sage rulers Yao and Shun, the Legalist Han Fei argues that one cannot praise them both because that would be making a "spear–shield" contradiction.

Among the Chu, there was a man selling shields and spears. He praised the former saying, "My shields are so solid nothing can penetrate them". Then he would praise his spears saying, "My spears are so sharp that among all things there's nothing they can't penetrate". Somebody else said, "If somebody tried to penetrate your shields with your spears, what would happen?" The man could not respond.

The first sentence would read thus, using modern Standard Chinese pronunciation:

A fairly literal translation would be "among Chu people, there existed somebody who was selling shields and spears". All words can be literally translated into English, except for the final particle zhě 者 'one who', 'somebody who', which works as nominalizer marking a verb phrase as certain kinds of noun phrases.^[19] The original Chinese sentence is marked with five Japanese kaeriten as:

楚人有_下鬻_二盾與_一レ矛者_上

To interpret this, the word 有 'existed' marked with shita 下 'bottom' is shifted to the location marked by ue 上 'top'. Likewise, the word 鬻 'sell' marked with ni 二 'two' is shifted to the location marked by ichi 一 'one'. The re レ 'reverse' mark indicates that the order of the adjacent characters must be reversed. To represent this reading in numerical terms:

Following these kanbun instructions step by step transforms the sentence so it has the typical Japanese subject–object–verb argument order. The Sino-Japanese on'yomi readings and meanings are:

Next, Japanese function words and conjugations can be added with okurigana, and Japanese to ... to と...と 'and' can substitute Chinese 與 'and'. More specifically, the first と is treated as an additional function word, and the second, the reading of 與:

Lastly, kun'yomi readings for characters can be annotated with furigana. Normally furigana are only used for uncommon kanji or unusual readings. This sentence's only uncommon kanji is hisa(gu) 鬻ぐ 'sell', 'deal in', a literary character which is included in neither the kyōiku kanji nor the jōyō kanji lists. However, in kanbun texts it is relatively common to use a large amount of furigana—often there is an interest in recovering the readings used by people of the Heian or Nara periods, and since many kanji can be read either with on'yomi or kun'yomi pronunciations in a kanbun text, the furigana can show at least one editor's opinion of how it may have been read.

楚（そ）人（ひと）に盾（たて）と矛（ほこ）とを鬻（ひさ）ぐ者（もの）有（あ）り

The completed kundoku translation reads as a well-formed Japanese sentence with kun'yomi:

This annotated kanbun translates to, "among Chu people, there existed one who was selling shields and spears".

To illustrate what is possible with kaeriten, here follows a rather complicated example from Crawcour's book, to which he notes: “The student may take some light comfort from the fact that this is as complicated as these markings can get.”^[20]

使_㆟籍誠不_㆚以_㆘蓄_㆓妻子_㆒，憂_㆗飢寒_㆖亂_㆙㆑心，有_㆑錢以濟_㆞醫藥_㆝，其盲未_㆑甚，庶幾其復見_㆓天地日月_㆒。（韓愈。代張籍與李浙東書）

籍（せき）をして誠（まこと）に妻子（さいし）を蓄（たくは）へ、飢寒（きかん）を憂（うれ）ふるを以（もっ）て心（こころ）を亂（みだ）さず、錢（せん）を有（たも）ちて以（もっ）て醫藥（いやく）を濟（な）さしめば、其（そ）の盲（まう）未（いま）だ甚（はなはだ）しからず庶幾（ほとんど）其（そ）れ復（また）天地（てんち）日月（じつげつ）を見（み）ん。

Kanbun were added to the Unicode Standard in June 1993 with version 1.1. Two Unicode kaeriten are grammatical symbols (㆐㆑) for linking and reverse marks. The others are the organizational kanji for numerals (e.g. ㆒), locatives (e.g. ㆖), Heavenly Stems (e.g. ㆙), and levels (e.g. ㆝).

The Unicode block for kanbun is U+3190..319F:

• Gugyeol
• Idu script
• Interlinear gloss
• Chữ Nôm
• Wakan Konko Bun

Look up 漢文 in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Kanbun in Unicode
• Kanbun – Test for Unicode support in Web browsers, Alan Wood
• International Research Project Based on Kanbun Sources to Reconstruct a View of Japanese Culture, Nishōgakusha University