In the Japanese writing system are ligatures in the kana writing system, both hiragana and katakana. Kana such as and are not kana ligatures, but polysyllabic kana.
Hardly any kana ligatures or polysyllabic kana are represented in standard character encodings.
These characters were widely used until a spelling reform of 1900 decreed that each sound (mora) would be represented by one (kana) character. They were not represented in computer character encodings until JIS X 0213:2000 (JIS2000) added yori and koto.
| historical/Hepburn | image | character | Unicode | origin | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| かしこ/kashiko | - | - | しこ | ||
| こと/koto | - | - | こと[1] | ||
| ごと/goto | ゙ | - | - | ごと | |
| さま/sama | - | - | さ[2] | ||
| - | - | ||||
| まゐらせさうらふ/mairasesōrō | - | - | 参らせ候ふ | ||
| - | - | ||||
| より/yori | ゟ | U+309F | より |
| historical/Hepburn | image | character | Unicode | origin | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| トイフ/toyū | - | - | ト云[5] [6] [7] | ||
| トキ/toki | - | - | トキ[8] | ||
| トテ/tote | - | - | トテ | ||
| トモ/tomo | U+2A708 | トモ | |||
| ドモ/domo | - | - | ドモ | ||
| ヨリ/yori | - | - | ヨリ[9] |
| historical/Hepburn | image | character | Unicode | origin | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| イフ/yū | - | - | 云 | ||
| コト/koto | 20px | ヿ | U+30FF | 事 | |
| シテ/shite | U+2CF00 | 為 | |||
| トキ/toki | - | - | 時 | ||
| ナリ/nari | U+2CEFF | 也 |