Hiragana and Katakana

There has been some confusion in Japanese classes recently about the use of hiragana and katakana over the centuries. Wikipedia is not a big help on this--the description for hiragana simply implies that it is a cursive form of Chinese (which, in an extreme derivation, it is, but that in itself is an entire lecture unbefitting of a blog post).

O.K., let's get this straight. Although hiragana (one of the Japanese phonetic scripts) looks rounder and softer than katakana (the other of the phonetic scripts) does, that does not really give credence to the idea of one being exclusively for women and the other being exclusively for men. What was important was what people were writing, not which sex they were. It so happens that, in the Heian period, women wrote almost exclusively diaries, and men wrote almost exclusively government and official texts, hence the difference in how they wrote. Men were writing in kanbun (classical Chinese) and women were writing in hiragana, mixed with a few kanji. Katakana was developed at the same time as hiragana, but it was largely used for glossing kanbun texts.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, katakana continued to be used for official documents, but it also came to be used in the same way that we use italics in English--for emphasis, and for foreign words. So, it is always important to ask yourself what you are reading before you assume that some odd term in katakana is a foreign loan word.

What's missing?

A recent topic at faculty meetings has been what component(s) is/are missing from our curriculum. As many of you know, we underwent an outside program review last year and part of that process was interviewing students about what they wanted out of the department. We got some really useful information from that process, but the sample size was small (that is, we only heard from current students who could make the interview sessions). I'm sure there are plenty of you out there who couldn't be part of the process but have useful input for us. So, here is the question: if we were to add courses to the department, what area of specialty (e.g., Sociology, Economics, Psychology, Political Science, etc.) would you most like to see? How likely would you (and your fellow majors) be (or have been) to sign up for classes in that area?