Can Japanese be written without any kana (kanji only)?

Question

I always assumed that Japanese uses a minimum amount of hiragana until I opened this Life and Death Dictionary (Game of Go) and everything is in kanji. Are there kanji for the particles (は が で に も etc...)? If not, can one write Japanese without particles? In the image text, are the particles implied but not written?

Answer 1

Update: to address the broader question in the headline, rather than just the specifics of the sample text.

Can Japanese be written without any kana (kanji only)?

That question has been asked and answered before:

• Is it possible to write Japanese in pure Kanji?

Please see that post for a fuller discussion of the general question.

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As noted by Jack Kendall, this looks a lot like a Chinese-language text.

Hints include the following:

• Complete lack of kana
  Outside of newspaper headlines, modern Japanese generally cannot be written intelligibly without kana. Old Japanese was written entirely in kanji, but that's a different matter -- see the Wikipedia articles on man'yōgana and the Man'yōshū poetry compilation of roughly 759 CE.
• Non-Japanese variants of certain characters
  • Japanese kanji have specific shapes and forms, which may differ slightly from the Chinese forms. For 黒・黑 ("black"), notice the difference in the box-like portion on top of each character (apologies for the abuse of headers, it's the only way to display the characters in a larger font size):

  • 黒

    • The Japanese form

  • 黑

    • The Chinese form, which we see in the text in your photograph
• A high incidence of the character 是
  • This is not a very common character in modern Japanese usage, appearing in a few set terms like 是非【ぜひ】 ("absolutely"), 是正【ぜせい】 ("a correction"). In Chinese, however, you'll find it all over the place, as [是]{shì} is the copula, the "is" verb. And, indeed, we see [是]{shì} all over the place in your sample text.
• Non-Japanese punctuation
  • The Japanese comma looks like 、, a small diagonal tick on the bottom of its text layout area. The Chinese comma looks like ，, more similar to a Western comma, sometimes even more specifically so, like a dot with a curly tail. It's often more commonly laid out in the exact center of its layout area, which again is what we see in your sample text.

Even without reading the text, the above factors all point to this being a text in Chinese -- not Japanese.

Answer 2

At the risk of sounding condescending, is the book definitely intended for a Japanese audience? As far as I'm aware standard, formal, modern Japanese basically always contains hiragana. Is it possibly a Chinese language?