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Why Do Japanese Still Use Kanji? Complicated Writing System…

That Japanese Man Yuta was featured in "'Think' in Japanese" (10/13/25) a few days ago, where he raised some serious questions about kanji usage.  One that neither he nor we answered / confronted satisfactorily / adequately is that different "spellings" of homophones (e.g., おもう 思う / 想う) are written with different logographs / morphosyllabographs, not just different letters / phonetic symbols, so by nature they do not merely convey sound, but also, to one degree or another, convey meaning.

In this longer (12:19) video, near the beginning, Yuta emphasizes that katakana and hiragana are purely phonetic syllabaries with which you can write any Japanese word.  He writes some sentences in katakana and hiragana and says — already at 1:52 — that it is hard to read them because they don't have any spaces between words.

Well, instantly at that moment, I thought to myself, "Why not insert the spaces?  Then you wouldn't have to put up with the clumsy, difficult kanji."  (Think what has happened to hangul in recent years. also Vietnamese ["Not using space is uncommon even in instant messaging."])  Instead, Yuta stresses the efficacy of kanji in breaking up the flow of kana only text.

During the remainder of the video, Yuta continues with a fair appraisal of kanji, and points out more of its defects and deficiencies.  He mentions an American Marine Corps Major named John Campbell Pelzel ジョン・キャンベル・ペルゼル (1914-1999) in Japan during the Allied occupation of Japan.  Apparently Pelzel was one of the officers in charge of the kanji eradication campaign 漢字廃止論, but failed.  For more on the Allied effort to abolish kanji, see William C. Hannas, Asia's Orthographic Dilemma, pages 43-47, focusing especially on the work of Major Robert K. Hall.

James Unger:

Here's one of the earliest SPPs:

J. Marshall Unger, "Computers and Japanese Literacy: Nihonzin no Yomikaki Nôryoku to Konpyûta", Sino-Platonic Papers, 6 (January, 1988), 13 pp.

The Japanese romanization matches the English quite nicely.

Yuta even points out that early video games in Japan, which was a pioneer in this field, due to technical limitations, did have kana-only texts, with spaces, and it worked just fine.

In the end, though he recognizes that kanji have many drawbacks, Yuta admits that Japanese are loathe to abandon them because of their ATTACHMENT to these historical-cultural emblems of Japaneseness.  It's like an old couple who may have fought a lot with each other during their long marriage, but they've been through much together, so they'll continue to stick it out.  After all, they LOVE each other.

BTW, don't become too attached to the English subtitles of this video, because many of them are misleading or wrong.  They must have been done by speech recognition and translation technology.  For example, the subtitles often say "country" in English when Yuta says "kanji".

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After I finished writing this post and was searching for "Selected readings", I realized that I had already partially covered it in this earlier post nearly a decade ago:  

"Character amnesia and kanji attachment" (2/24/16)

I've added much more here, and now we also have Julesy's take on the same question from a Chinese point of view.

Selected readings

• "Japanese survey on forgetting how to write kanji" (9/24/12)
• "More katakana, fewer kanji" (4/4/16)
• "Kanji as commodity" (4/30/18)
• "'The insane effort to preserve this ancient script'" (10/7/25) — with a list of other Julesy videos
• "A radical proposal for sinographs" (5/23/25)
• Geoff Pullum, "There Was No Committee", Lingua Franca (4/30/14)
• _________, "The Awful Chinese Writing System", Lingua Franca (1/20/16)

Haun Saussy, "The Prestige of Writing:  文, Letter, Picture, Image, Ideography", Sino-Platonic Papers, 75 (February, 1997), 1-40.  If you've not yet had the pleasure and privilege of reading this pathbreaking, learned article, do it now while its before your fortunate eyes.

October 21, 2025 @ 6:48 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language reform, Parsing, Phonetics and phonology, Writing systems

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