Justice Watch presents: Cherry Bomb: HOTLINE BING

(Are those akin to word squares, where horizontally and vertically they spell words? Because that would be awesome)

They're not, the Japanese syllabary has each character pairing a consonant and a vowel sound, so when learning them they're often written in a grid, with the same consonant sound in (this case) columns, and same vowel sound in rows.

Fun fact though, the old-style alphabetization of Japanese was to order things based on a perfect pangram poem, the iroha.

いろはにほへと
ちりぬるを
わかよたれそ
つねならむ
うゐのおくやま
けふこえて
あさきゆめみし
ゑひもせす

Translated, this reads something like:

Even the blossoming flowers
Will eventually scatter
Who in our world
Is unchanging?
The deep mountains of karma—
We cross them today
And we shall not have superficial dreams
Nor be deluded.