Graduate School of Letters, Division of Philology and Literature(Eastern) Associate Professor
I specialize in the history of Japanese language, especially the history of Japanese written languages (文語文). Now I'm mainly involved with the study of Hentai Kanbun (変体漢文, HK) in Japan.
HK is one of the writing forms of Japanese language that used to be so popular. It adopts the form and structure of Kanbun (Chinese writing), using almost only Kanji (Chinese characters), not Kana (Japanese syllabary), and word order is SVO, not SOV. So at a glance it seems Chinese, but actually it's a sinicized way to write Japanese (we can see it through some Japanese features in it: Japanese autochthonous words, honorific particles, irregular word order, etc.).
It may seem so weird to write Japanese language in the style of Chinese, but in fact, it kept being a normal means to write documents until the 20th century, so it's an essential part of the history of written Japanese.