Abstract
Whereas the general definition of man'yogana includes the recognition that the writing system functions by detaching the meanings from the Chinese characters used for the kana, kungana (a type of man'yogana based on native kun'yomi readings of Chinese characters) in the poetry anthology Man'yoshu often takes advantage of the meaning of the characters. This paper revisits the use of kungana in the Man'yoshu and points out that, in addition to the often- sited variants of kana characters which took advantage of the meanings of the Chinese characters, this paper demonstrates the existence of variants of kana characters which were chosen to desensitize readers to the logogrammatic meanings of Chinese characters. In these cases, Chinese characters with expressive import that could make readers conscious of the writer's view to express some sense were avoided. This tendency in the use of man'yogana is contrasted with the way of using the variants of kana that originated from kungana in the Heian period, and the same quality of the variants of kana in the Man'yoshu and kana in the Heian period is pointed out and the relationship between this result and hiragana as phonogram is discussed.
