1. Hiragana (ひらがな): A syllabary with 46 characters representing syllables. It's primarily used to write grammatical particles, verb endings, and native Japanese words.
2. Katakana (カタカナ): Another syllabary with 46 characters, also representing syllables. It's used to write foreign words, onomatopoeia, emphasis, and proper nouns.
3. Kanji (漢字): Logographic characters borrowed from Chinese. Each kanji represents a word or concept and there are thousands of them in use. They're used to write nouns, verbs, adjectives, and complex concepts.
While these are the three main writing systems, it's important to remember that Japanese also utilizes other writing systems like Romanization (using the Latin alphabet) and various symbols like punctuation marks.