Genji Monogatari Emaki
The word "emaki" stems from the word "emakimono" meaning "picture scrolls". The emakimono picture scrolls consisted of two designs: Pictures that were painted on a scroll with text added to the same scroll or a number of paintings that accompanied passages of text and were joined together in a scroll. The first known picture scroll was produced in Japan during the late ninth or tenth century. The "Genji Monogatari" picture scroll, however, was produced in the early twelfth century. Not only is the "Genji Monogatari Emaki" the oldest surviving monogatari scroll but it is also the oldest surviving non-Buddhist scroll in Japan. There is no exact date to the scroll, but it is estimated to being sometime between 1120 and 1140, in which case it was created just a little over a century after Murasaki Shikibu wrote "The Tale of Genji".
Japanese calligraphy
At the same time, a style of calligraphy unique to Japan emerged. Writing had been popularized, and the "kana" syllabary was devised to deal with elements of pronunciation that could not be written with the borrowed Chinese characters. Japanese calligraphers still fitted the basic characters, called "kanji" , into the squares laid out centuries before. A fragment, "Kara-ai no hana no utagire" (, AD 749) is considered the first text to show a style unique to Japanese calligraphy; it shows a Tanka poem using Man'yōgana, thus deviated from contemporary Chinese calligraphy. Ono no Michikaze (AD 894-966), one of the so-called "sanseki" , "Three Brush Traces"), along with Fujiwara no Sukemasa and Fujiwara no Yukinari, is considered the founder of the authentically Japanese "wayō" style, or "wayō-shodō" . This development resonated with the court: Kūkai said to Emperor Saga, "China is a large country and Japan is relatively small, so I suggest writing in a different way." The , a poem written by Emperor Saga on the occasion of Saichō's death, was one of the examples of such a transformation. Ono no Michikaze served as an archetype for the "Shōren-in" school, which later became the "Oie" style of calligraphy. The "Oie" style was later used for official documents in the Edo period and was the prevailing style taught in the "terakoya" schools of that time.