Kanbun

Kanbun (Japanese: 漢文, "Sinitic writing") is a Japanese term whose principal sense is writing in Literary Sinitic, including texts composed or circulated in Japan. The term has also been used more broadly for Japanized forms of Sinitic writing and for the tradition surrounding their Japanese reading. Kanbun kundoku (漢文訓読) is the conventional method of reading a Literary Sinitic text as Classical Japanese, assigning Japanese readings and grammatical elements and, where necessary, changing the reading order. A kundoku rendition may use both Sino-Japanese on'yomi and native kun'yomi readings; it is distinct from simply reciting the characters by their Sino-Japanese pronunciations. Before the widespread use of kana, which developed from cursive forms and components of Chinese characters, Literary Sinitic was extensively used in Japan for official, religious, intellectual, and literary writing. The large surviving corpus includes Chinese classics and Buddhist texts as well as works composed in Japan.