man’yō-gana

…of Chinese characters, known as man’yōgana, were employed to represent Japanese phonetic sounds, and two even more abbreviated phonetic writing systems, hiragana and katakana, were known in nascent form. The former was highly stylized and cursive, while the latter was somewhat more severe and rectilinear in form. Use of hiragana…

…known among Japanese grammarians as man’yō-gana, because its expression is most diversified in the Man’yōshū.