The Koreans and Vietnamese got rid of them within the last century, even the Chinese — for more than a century — seriously considered abolishing the sinographs, and have simplified them until they are but a pale remnant of what they used to be. Moreover, after WWI, when — with the help of the American occupation — Japan had a real chance to switch to an alphabet, the Japanese, on the whole, still clung to the kanji. This is not to mention that the first great novel in an East Asian language, The Tale of Genji (before 1021 AD), which has a stature in Japan similar to that= of Shakespeare in the United Kingdom (Sonja Arntzen), was written by Lady Murasaki in the phonetic hiragana syllabary (aka "women's writing").
The fact that the Japanese still have not abandoned the archaic morphosyllabic / logographic script is a conundrum that has puzzled me since I first learned Chinese and Japanese more than half a century ago. Such a fundamental question about the history of East Asian writing is one that could scarcely escape the attention of rishika Julesy. Here is her video about this thorny matter, "Why Kanji Survived in Japan (But Not in Korea or Vietnam)" (22:25). I am confident that, as always, she will have something enlightening to say about this perplexing subject.
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