Possibly what has misled foreign critics and even some Japanese writers is that there exists a class of men in Japan given to learning, to writing, and also to painting in a particular way.
These men are called BUN JIN (literati) and their style of painting is called BUN JIN FU. They are not artists, but are known as Confucius’ scholars (JU SHA), and being professional or trained writers in the difficult art of Chinese calligraphy they have a manner of painting strictly _sui generis._ It is known as the NAN GWA or southern literary way of painting. Their subjects are the bamboo, the plum, the orchid and the chrysanthemum, called the four paragons (SHI KUN SHI). These and landscapes they paint with their writing brush and more or less in what is called the grass character (SO SHO) manner of writing. In fact, they often aim to make their painting look like writing and they rarely use any color except light-brown (TAI SHA). They suppress line as distinguished from mass. This method is called _bokkotsu_ (see _Plate XII_). Such painting of the NAN GWA school is, in a sense, calligraphic, but that is not the kind of painting which Japanese artists are taught, practice and profess, nor is it even recognized as an art, but simply as an eccentric development of the literary man with a taste for painting. At one time or another well-known artists, especially at the beginning of the Meiji era, have affected this BUN JIN calligraphy style simply as a passing fashion.
One other possible explanation of the critics pronouncing all Japanese paintings calligraphic is that various Chinese characters are, as we have seen, invoked and employed by Japanese artists as memory aids to producing certain effects; but were these characters introduced calligraphically, the result would be laughable. It should be plain then that Japanese painting is not calligraphic; as well apply the term calligraphy to one of Turner’s water colors. On the other hand, Chinese writing is built up on word pictures. There are between five and six hundred mother characters, all imitating the shapes of objects; these, with their later combinations, constitute the Chinese written system, so that while there is nothing calligraphic about Japanese painting, there is much that is pictorial about Chinese calligraphy.