TOKYO — Living alone in a tidy little house on the outskirts of Tokyo, 75-year-old Tomohiro Ishizuka spends hours dwelling on things unsaid. There are, he recalls, the stories he never told his two ...

We’re back and ready to take on the third, and most puzzling, type of Japanese text: katakana. Recently, we started taking a look at the question of why the Japanese language needs three sets of ...

Japanese is known for its combination of three scripts: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. However, a fourth script is also used on occasion, and has even been suggested at times as a replacement for the ...

Yes, it’s true. Japanese has three completely separate sets of characters, called kanji, hiragana, and katakana, that are used in reading and writing. That first rendering of “Tokyo” is in kanji, with ...