Kanji (help·info) (?) are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with hiragana (, ), katakana (, ), Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet (also known as Rōmaji). The Japanese term kanji () literally means "Han characters". Chinese characters first came to Japan on articles imported from China.

An early instance of such an import was a gold seal given by the emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty in 57 AD. It is not clear when Japanese people started to gain a command of Classical Chinese by themselves. The first Japanese documents were probably written by Chinese immigrants.

For example, the diplomatic correspondence from King Bu of Wa to Emperor Shun of the Liu Song Dynasty in 478 has been praised for its skillful use of allusion. Later, groups of people called fuhito were organized under the monarch to read and write Classical Chinese. From the 6th century onwards, Chinese documents written in Japan tended to show interference from Japanese, suggesting the wide acceptance of Chinese characters in Japan.

The Japanese language itself had no written form at the time kanji were introduced.[citation needed] Originally texts were written in the Chinese language and would have been read as such. Over time, however, a system known as kanbun () emerged, which involved using Chinese text with diacritical marks to allow Japanese speakers to restructure and read Chinese sentences, by changing word order and adding particles and verb endings, in accordance with the rules of Japanese grammar.

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