Japanese is written with three different sets of characters, kanji, hiragana, and katakana.

Kanji are the set of roughly 2,000 Chinese characters borrowed over several centuries starting from around the time of the first Buddhist missionaries from Korea and China in the 3rd - 4th centuries. (The word "kan-ji" literally means "characters (ji) of the Han (kan) people. At that time, Japanese existed in spoken form only. The borrowed characters allowed Japanese to be written. However, there are fundamental differences not just in monosyllabic Chinese and polysyllabic Japanese words, but in grammar (Chinese is somewhat similar to English, while only Korean and Japanese are grammatically similar to each other.) This was not a problem when using kanji for simple nouns or adjectives, but Chinese characters proved awkward to use for inflected words such as verbs. A system of phonetic characters (kana) were derived from various kanji which were then used to represent the various verb ending (conjugations.)

Kanji have both sound and meaning, and in fact, have several different pronunciations, depending on the context. This represents the biggest hurdle in learning Japanese for non-Oriental peoples.

Kana come in two forms: hiragana and katakana . Both represent the 56 sounds which combine to form Japanese words. These characters have a sound no meaning; they are, in this respect, like Roman letters. Although there are some "simple kanji" of a few strokes, in general, kana are written with just 2 or 3 short flowing strokes, while kanji are contain anywhere from 1 to more than 30! Most tourists usually can recognize the difference after a short time between the "simple characters" (kana) and the "complicated ones" (kanji.)

In general, hiragana is used to form Japanese words by themselves and in combination with kanji.. katakana characters are generally used for foreign loan words and emphasis; they are in this respect roughly (very roughly) comparable to italics.

When Japanese is rendered in Roman letters it is called romaji ("ji" means "character.") There are two main systems of Romanization, and though these systems are very similar, there are some differences which when used in place names, can be confusing to foreigners. The romanizations used here are suitable for business purposes, even if they do not correspond precisely to any standard romanization system or represent a thorough guide to pronunciation Keep in mind that different people may transliterate differently; for example, Ota, Oota, and Ohta are just different ways of spelling the same name.