万葉仮名

Etymology
Compound of.

This kind of phonetic re-use of Chinese characters was broadly popularized by the Man'yōshū. Chinese used phonetically to spell Japanese occurs even earlier in the historical record, such as on the Inariyama Sword, dated to 471 or 531.

Noun

 * 1) Man'yōgana, the early Japanese syllabary using Chinese characters to represent Japanese sounds: the predecessor of hiragana and katakana