Those are Kana. The Kana are two phonetic alphabets that you learn in the first two weeks of Japanese 1. It's a pretty awesome writing system and it's a crying shame that they decided to overlay Kanji on top of most of it. The two Kana are Hiragana and Katakana - Hiragana is the normal kind that is interleaved with Kanji in normal writing. Katakana is more angular and used like bold face, or to write loanwords.
The two Kana in that particular image are Hiragana; the first is "Ka" the second is "Ji."
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