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Before we parted ways, he asked me to repeat my name, and wrote it down on the back of a receipt in katakana, a Japanese alphabet commonly used for foreign words.

The company announced on Twitter it had decided to replace the penguin with "Dojo-chan" - an anthropomorphic representation of the Japanese katakana character "do".

��I loved the Japanese language,�� she writes, ��and, more than anything, Japanese literature written with the three distinct systems of Japanese writing: graceful hiragana �Ҥ餬��, spartan katakana ��������, and dense kanji �h��.��

In a similar vein, Kana Quest is a sliding block puzzle game that��s designed to teach you Japanese hiragana and katakana characters.

In 1999, I was in a Tokyo department store walking down a household cleaning products aisle and had what you might call an ecstatic moment when the pastel-tinted plastic bottles on both sides of the aisle temporarily froze my reptile cortex: pink, yellow, baby blue, turquoise �� so many cute-looking bottles filled with so many toxic substances, all labeled with bold katakana lettering.