You're certainly right about kokujin. I think that Brendan simply committed a lapsus calami, so to speak (since we're on that topic!).

I love what you say in your response to Apollo about the intelligibility of spoken Japanese and the somewhat diglossic nature of Japanese. The same could be said of Chinese. The more that phoneticity is operative in Japanese and Chinese writing, the less diglossic they will become.

@SeekTruthFromFacts

I agree with what you say about rollerball pens. They work much better than the hard, stiff ball point pens of old. But my favorite pens for writing Chinese characters are the needle point Pilot Hi-Tec-C gel pens from Japan. They come in a rainbow of colors, plus the tips stay sharp and are fine enough to write even the smallest strokes of characters. I also like the way the ink comes out wet but dries very quickly. I always sign checks and books with one of these pens, and I will always endeavor to use one when writing characters. I think they are called geru no pen ゲルのペン in Japanese, but I don't know what they're called in Chinese.

Here are some relevant terms in Chinese

yuánzhūbǐ 圓珠筆 ("ballpoint pen")

yuánzǐ bǐ 原子笔 ("atomic pen" — the old name for "ballpoint pen")

gǔnyuánzhūbǐ 辊圆珠笔 ("rollerball pen")

gāngbǐ 钢笔 ("ink pen" — still my favorite writing instrument for composing manuscripts, especially the Rotring Art Pen, but with a regular nib, not one of the calligraphic nibs)
http://www.dickblick.com/products/rotring-art-pens/#photos

Ball-point pens are rare in China. Almost everybody uses rollerballs. I thought this was annoying until the first time I tried to write Chinese characters…. Since then I've only ever bought one ball-point in China, in order to sign the backs of debit cards.

Sometimes there’s phonetic play into it too: The first anime of my childhood, Saint Seiya (Japanese pronunciation: Seinto Seiya), is written 聖闘士星矢, which usually would be read as seitōshi seiya (so the Sino-Japanese sound somewhat approximates the English). What’s more, the characters mean “Saint Fighter Star Arrow”, but “Star Arrow” = Seiya is the name of the protagonist, who happens to fight with meteors; and he’s also a “Saint”, which is a kind of holy warrior.

Another interesting case I spotted was a character from Rurōni Kenshin who had been a member of the peasant’s army called Sekihōtai 赤報隊 . In a conversation, the character once said something like “We would never do that”, where the word oretachi “we” was a furigana gloss to Sekihōtai, written in kanji. So kanji where used to resolve an anaphoric reference!

It is true, however, that many existing written Japanese texts would be hard to understand only through the sound (unlike spoken Japanese). That’s why I said above that Japanese probably is somewhat diglossic; the written vocabulary must use more homophones (especially kango) than they use in conversation. The reason they do this is because they can; with the visual support of kanji to disambiguate, there’s no reason to avoid homophones.

Since Japanese is a living spoken language, intelligible even to children and illiterates (like all natural languages), it must be perfectly possible to write it in kana or alphabet—provided that they changed the kind of Japanese they write. But I think it’s fairly clear that the Japanese (save exceptions) wouldn’t want to do anything like that—and that’s their prerogative. They’ve been playing with the complexity of kanji since at least the Man’yōshū (and probably earlier); simplicity was never a feature they looked for in writing systems, or they’d have abandoned kanji for bonji back when they learned it in the 9th century. Even modern manga comics routinely play with characters; for example, by using English-language furigana, which effectively turns characters into semantic annotations to English text. (Similarly, because Edo-era popular literature relied on furigana, it was able to conjure rare or unstandard characters, causing a range of whimsical juxtaposition effects).

About premodern unspaced hiragana: notice that kana manuscripts, even if lacking word division, still have a number of visual features that are lost in typographical kana and that make them easier to read; there’s more shapes available, and they can link characters in the same word (or word+particle unit, bunsetsu), etc. Compare the jumble of unspaced kana above with the visual rhythm of any manuscript.

"clarification"

Then maybe people should strive to write clearly!

Indeed, one of the things that makes reading the prose of good writers enjoyable is the clarity of what they have written. Conversely, nothing is more aggravating than reading a mountain of obscure prose, prose which is full of circumlocutions and pedanticisms.

" In fact I think it seems…."

Now THAT is a hypothetical mouthful that is almost as ambiguous as some of the scholarly Japanese writing I've encountered that drives me to distraction. I suppose that you are trying to assert the superiority of handwriting pads over Pinyin inputting, but what do you use on a daily basis? If you tell me that you exclusively or mostly use the handwriting pad to enter Chinese on your computer and other electronic devices, I can tell you that you are in a distinct minority. I am going to write a separate Language Log post on this matter that will set the record straight for the PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.

Someone — probably Cindy Carter — once told me about a book by (if memory serves) a Japanese woman in the US in which the author used furigana alongside the characters 黑人 to indicate the pronunciation "brother" (or ブラアザ, I guess) instead of the expected "hakujin." I wonder if anyone has done anything similar with Zhuyin ruby in Taiwan.

I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis on Takuboku's Romaji nikki and am always glad to see it mentioned. I think you are right about the significance of spacing–in addition to romaji writing, all of the cases of modern all-hiragana writing that I have seen (in children's books, exclusively so I think) have used spaces to divide words. Of course, in premodern and early modern texts there are many many cases of all or almost all hiragana writing with no spacing at all…

But now with bigger phones (like the Samsung Galaxy Note 2) I see people writing characters with their fingers all the time. In fact I think it seems more natural to slide your finger around on the glass surface than to press virtual buttons on the surface. You can write characters that way without looking, but with a keyboardful of virtual buttons it's not really possible to "type" without looking.

Kana-only writing is quite common in Japanese chidren's books, where spaces are employed to facilitate the learning and reading processes.

Rōmaji-only writing, like Esperanto, was mostly a passing "modern" fad among progressive, internationalist intellectuals in the early twentieth century, Takuboku and fellow Iwate natives Nitobe Inazo and Tanakadate Aikichi among them. Rōmaji-only Japanese was destined to failure because it attempted to encompass the entire spectrum of "adult" Japanese, unlike kana-only Japanese, which is confined to early childhood.

The high degree of homophony (limited phonetic system) of Japanese makes kanji/hanzi an absolute necessity for efficient reading. It seems unlikely that either Rōmaji-only or kana-only Japanese would ever be able to fully replace the richness and efficiency of the current mixed orthographical system.

For reference:

Page from a popular children's picture book, demonstrating the use of spaces between words:
http://www.bamkero.com/works/nichi_image/thumbnails/nichi_01_l.jpg (Sorry it's so small)

The following images are from beginning Japanese readers used in Japanese schools. My guess is that this one (1950) is for first grade: http://sakubun-abc.img.jugem.jp/20101021_597168.jpg
Here is a more recent textbook of the same level: http://itpro.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/NEWS/20100927/352298/ph2.jpg
And another:
http://blog-imgs-29.fc2.com/b/e/a/beautifulkids/20100331084933f31.jpg
From second grade on, spaces disappear, if I recall correctly (someone please correct me if that's wrong!)

One interesting thing that Takuboku does is, he capitalizes noun and noun-like words (meishi). Besides looking like German, this reproduces some of the effect of mixed writing (because nouny words often coincide with the kind of lexical content usually marked by being written in kanji). I’ve been experimenting with this convention in my own blog; it’s a shame that it’s mostly unknown these days (even though, as Matt pointed once, it’s actually sanctioned by the government).

For comparison, here’s the opening of an Wikipedia article in majiribun:

> 言語学（げんごがく）は、人類が使用する言語の本質や構造を科学的に記述する学問である。

A version in kana :

> けんごがくは、じんるいがしようするげんごのほんしつやこうぞうをかがくてきにきじゅつするがくもんである。

With spacing:

> けんごがくは、　じんるいが　しようする　げんごの　ほんしつや　こうぞうを　かがくてきに　きじゅつする　がくもん　である。

With current-style Hepburn romanization:

> Gengogaku wa, jinrui ga shiyō-suru gengo no honshitsu ya kōzō wo kagaku-teki ni kijutsu-suru gakumon de aru.

WIth capitalization:

> Gengogaku wa, Jinrui ga Shiyō-suru Gengo no Honshitsu ya Kōzō wo Kagaku-teki ni Kijutsu-suru Gakumon de aru.

We could also use native tsukau for Sinitic shiyou, avoiding some homophones; and perhaps mark accent like Martin used to (Jínrui, Géngo etc.)

"Random musings on why Japanese people hate kana-only writing…."

On the other hand, not a few people have written texts in rōmaji ローマ字 (Romanization), one of the earliest and most famous being the diary of Ishikawa Takuboku.

"The novella Romaji Diary represents the first instance of a Japanese writer using romaji (roman script) to tell stories in a way that could not be told in kana or kanji." See

http://books.google.com/books/about/Romaji_Diary_and_Sad_Toys.html?id=U-B0PwAACAAJ

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takuboku_Ishikawa

I suspect that one of the reasons rōmaji-only writing is more acceptable / workable than kana-only writing is because rōmaji writing employs word division.