the.com/kanji

means The logographic characters, adopted from Chinese, used in writing Japanese alongside the hiragana and katakana syllabaries.

from The word itself is Japanese for 'Han characters' — kan (漢) pointing to the Han dynasty of China, ji (字) meaning 'character.' Chinese writing began entering Japan roughly in the early centuries CE via scholars, Buddhist texts, and trade, at a time when Japanese had no native script of its own. The Japanese didn't just borrow the characters — they stacked native Japanese readings (kun'yomi) on top of the imported Chinese-derived readings (on'yomi), so a single character ended up fluent in two languages at once.