Your handwriting can show everything --- It's just an old belief

My father always told me

     I remember my father telling me that you had to write letters neatly because your handwriting could show everything and people with dirty handwriting were useless and disreputable in a society.
     Actually he and his siblings had neat and beautiful handwriting in their own way. I often looked at their handwriting in their letters and postcards sent to us with admiration.

Magical and spiritual features of Chinese characters to power and authority

     Looking back on the history of the Chinese characters, they were used in magical, ritual and spiritual contexts when they began appearing: a person in power and authority held a ceremony to foresee the future of something important or mediate god’s words, and he recorded what he foresaw or heard in graphic characters curving them on a surface of something hard. That was several thousand years ago.
     Chinese characters came to Japan and people started using them around the fourth century AD. Then people began to apply the phonetic features of the characters for expressing Japanese language sounds, sometimes ignoring their original meanings. They also reduced the number of strokes, used cursive forms and simplified the shapes of the characters. That was the origin of Hiragana and Katakana, which are two kinds of phonetic symbols in the writing system of the Japanese language.
     Since then, for a long time, being able to read and write texts in Chinese characters has been crucial for people in the ruling class, administrative officials and religious priests.

Literacy has been a symbol of being intelligent and wealthy

     Since the Meiji Period (1868~) began, literacy became a symbol of being intelligent, wealthy or ascending in social classes. There were many stories of someone who came from a low class with a very poor background, made an effort and studied hard in school, and gained a high social status, fame or money. Such success stories may have been a hope for the poor.
     Therefore it made sense to me that my father, who had been educated in the 1930s of Imperial Japan, had a strong belief that writing letters neatly was a fundamental discipline of learning. He repeatedly said that your handwriting showed everything about you, and if you would like to be someone, you had to have good handwriting first.

How neatly you write letters is just a matter of skills and talents

     Because of the teaching of my father, I automatically came to judge people by their handwriting. However, as time went by, I had a different thought about it: how neatly you write letters is just a matter of skills and talents. That doesn’t show your level of intelligence. There are some who are good at that but others are not. There are some who improve their handwriting to a certain degree by training, but it’s also true there are some who don't improve even by training for some reason.
     Writing letters by hand and reading letters actually requires a collaborative function of motor senses and cognitive senses. In the brain, complicated processes are occurring. The smoothness of the processes depends on individuals. There are some whose brain working is different from the typical ones: dyslexia and dysgraphia.
     I feel sorry for some of my old students who might have struggled with such a problem. I should have had enough knowledge about that earlier. But I was just a young teacher who still believed her father’s teaching was a natural cause.