(If you are a Japanese learner, learning kana wouldn't hurt, it takes a few weeks at most anyways vs years for kanji - and it's not like you "master" kanji after those years, as any native speaker would be able to demonstrate).
As gibolt said, it's much easier to just learn to recognize characters, without being able to write them by hand.
If you learn Japanese for, say, 2 years, even without consciously trying to learn the characters (e.g. by using rikai-chan/kun) when reading articles, you'll encounter the same words over and over so you'll be able to recognize them, even if you can't write them by hand. And that's good enough.
Most native Japanese speakers cannot write words like 咀嚼 or 憂鬱 by hand, but many more can pronounce them just fine.
As a person who learned and teaches it, don't skip the characters.
That doesn't mean Chinese education is perfect right now, and I also think that traditional characters, while seeming more complex can be better for beginners as the system has a more regular internal consistency. And it's easier to learn simplified when knowing traditional than the reverse.