China helped Japan develop their written language as they did not have one. Before the Heian Period, Japanese was only a spoken language, and there were no written Japanese characters. Ambassadors returned from China with books containing Chinese characters, the Japanese began to adopt these characters into their own written language. First, the Japanese used kanji, or “Chinese writing” to first write Japanese words. Kanji allowed records to be kept, legends, and develop their own literature, but it was hard using Chinese characters to read and write Japanese. Then the Japanese created kana to write syllables of their language. It was based on simplified Chinese characters, this new system using “borrowed letters”, allowed writing to be able