As to spoken Japanese, this isn't hard to conclude from first principles, since the phonological structure of Japanese is quite spare. As few syllables are possible, the informational content per syllable is low. (related: I read a book containing an example intended to address the idea that Japanese is spoken faster than English -- an English sentence of six notional syllables such as "Smith's strength crushed six sleek ships" is going to take much longer to say than one such as "I made an apple pie", which is also six syllables. The second sentence has one consonant per syllable (on average), the first has considerably more. In Japanese, only the second kind is possible.)
The Japanese syllabary characters tend to be quite modestly formed; they have few essential pixels per character. The kanji, which carry large quantities of semantic information, require much more space to be legible.