The Gojūon: A Kind Samurai Told Naomi How My Yak Ran Wild.

Gojūon ordering
(hiragana)

	a	i	u	e	o
∅	あ	い	う	え	お
K	か	き	く	け	こ
S	さ	し	す	せ	そ
T	た	ち	つ	て	と
N	な	に	ぬ	ね	の
H	は	ひ	ふ	へ	ほ
M	ま	み	む	め	も
Y	や		ゆ		よ
R	ら	り	る	れ	ろ
W	わ	ゐ		ゑ	を
Additional kana
ん

The gojūon (五十音 lit. Fifty Sounds^?) is a Japanese ordering of kana  (A Japanese syllabary), named for the 5×10 grid in which the characters are displayed.

Each kana, which may be a hiragana or katakana character, corresponds to one sound in the Japanese language. As depicted at the right using hiragana characters, the sequence begins with あ (a), い (i), う (u), え (e), お (o), then continues with か (ka), き (ki), く (ku), け (ke), こ (ko), and so on for a total of ten rows of five.

In order to remember the gojūon, various mnemonics have been devised. For example,

A Kind Samurai Told Naomi How My Yak Ran Wild.

The first letters in this phrase give the ordering of the non-voiced initial sounds.
For vowel ordering, the vowel sounds in the following English phrase may be used as a mnemonic:

Ah, we soon get old.

The vowel sounds in the English words approximate the Japanese vowels: a, i, u, e, o.
One can also use

HAIL UNESCO

to remember the order of the vowels.

Kana are syllabic Japanese scripts, a part of the Japanese writing system contrasted with the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji (漢字). There are three kana scripts: modern cursive hiragana (ひらがな), modern angular katakana (カタカナ), and the old syllabic use of kanji known as man’yōgana (万葉仮名) that was ancestral to both.