> To confuse things even more, 此処 is valid Chinese as well

There's a lot more in common between the writing in Taiwan and Japan since Taiwan kept the "older" kanji while the CCP went thru the cultural revolution and the simplification of the number of strokes in each sign.

Still, there's a bunch of stuff that kind of looks like it would make sense when reading a Chinese word in Japanese, but turns out there's a lot of meanings are very different, either because the meaning evolved over time, or the Japanese simply imported kanji using their original sounds and not caring about their actual meaning.