In order to test the hypothesis that the lateralized N170 component is less likely to be evoked by logographic stimuli if they consist of a single letter, we conducted an experiment in which we showed a participant a single kana-letters with no meaning, two kana words, a single kanji words, two kanji words. We measured ERPs while the participant was reading them silently, and compared the waveform, latency and amplitude of the negativity peaking around 170 ms after stimulus presentation. Our results suggest that the processing of global word configurations was more relevant to the N170 amplitude at the temporal electrode sites than that of the logography. This appears to be consistent with the above-mentioned hypothesis.