A couple of off-topic notes:
༡༽ There's something weird about the post after this one: if I go directly to http://no-sword.jp/blog/2008/03/kimi_no_nasu_mama
my browser shows me code instead of rendered HTML. I think this happened once before...

༢༽ I've been reading A Short History of Linguistics, & when it's talking about Chinese there's a bit on Japanese orthography. After a brief & not-very-clear history of kanji & kana, there's this:
«
An intermediate stage, however, is worthy of notice. In this the character represented the root of the word, but other grammatical elements, as well as certain particles in close syntactic relationship with it, were indicated graphically by means of diacritical marks written at different positions round the character itself. Thus the verb kasikom-, to fear, would be represented by a particular character bearing a similar meaning in Chinese, and a small circle at its lower left hand corner would further indicate the word kasikomite, fearing, and a diagonal stroke at the top right-hand corner would indicate the word kasikomi-tari, (he, etc.) feared. This orthographic system did not remain in use, but it is of interest in its similarity to certain linguistic speculations and experiments in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
»
I don't recall having heard of this system before. Do you know anything about it?

1) D'oh! I just changed my blog-making program so it shouldn't happen again.

2) Never heard of it before -- I'll look into it...