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The hardest bit about redoing something from scratch is not how to design the new system, but it's in getting it adopted. Many societies have tried things like that, social inertia, especially paired with learning barriers (the steeper, the worse), and cultural and political notions (and Japan values and tries to preserve their history and culture quite a lot) is not something that can be just dismissed.
That's not to say that there weren't countries that had writing system overhauls, just that it's difficult and of questionable value and not entirely without negative effects.
Has to be said though that reform can be interpreted in exactly that way too, as revitalization. Hangul for example is also a kind of patriotic achievement. I've even heard, and that was coming from a Japanese friend (who speaks both languages): "we have the world's best and most logical writing system and the most illogical right here next to each other". And in the language department and the origins of their writing systems they're in a fairly comparable boat, just went in two very different directions.
And yet we took the roman alphabet and adopted it to english just fine, why was that okay but adopting the chinese writing system into Japanese wasn't?
> you can argue that they're not really literate, they just limit themselves to using a small portion of their 'kanji' and write little hiragana hints that tell you how to pronounce the written symbols for all the rest.
You can argue english speakers aren't really literate, they just limit themselves to a subset of english vocabulary, and memorize word pronunciations to understand when "ea" is pronounced like "e" as in "sear", or "air" like in "wear".
Like, I do not get at all what you're arguing here. In every language people only know a subset of the total vocabulary, and people general limit themselves to the subset that's actually used. In phonetic languages, sure you can pronounce an unknown word, but that doesn't mean you have any clue what it means. In non-phonetic languages, like English and Japanese, you may not even be able to pronounce an unknown word. In hieroglyphic languages, like Japanese and Chinese, you may be able to derive the meaning and pronunciation of a new word just from looking at the component characters and knowing their individual reading and meanings, often with better success than trying to guess an unfamiliar english word from its roots.
I do agree that English is terrible too. English is a mess of Latin, German, French words which is why spelling bee competitions are a thing in English but it would be stupid to have them in other languages such as Spanish and in fact Japanese too. In Spanish you can spell any word regardless of how long and confusing it might seem. Japanese too, using hiragana you can spell the sound of any Japanese word regardless of how how long or rare it is, good luck writing it though, a Japanese spelling bee is not possible but a written one is.
My argument is that the Japanese writing system is a big mess but spoken Japanese is not. Spoken English is a mess too. Any language were you have competitions about who can spell and write the words of the language is a big mess of a language.
While true, I believe there’s also plenty of heuristics available to make a good guess at what the unknown word may relate semantically, and how it might sound like. Not reliable, of course, but still conveying some information for a better-than-random guess. Or am I wrong?
If you watch a Let's Play of マザー２ (the original release of the cult classic SNES game EarthBound), you'll notice that writing Japanese using kana alone is not only possible, but that most native speakers have no trouble reading it -- although some claim that having a few kanji makes it easier because of homonyms.
https://www.youtube.com/live/F_UrqsO2JQ0?si=-1r-FbCZCJ3rt-Z1...
In modern content designed for people over the age of 10, spaces are uncommon as kanji does a lot of the word division duty. It’s also a little unstandardised: is 遅くなって初めて (when I first became late) one modified word or three words? Since regular Japanese writing doesn’t care as much about word partition, there is no standard so you could so anything from おそくなってはじめて to おそく なって はじめて when spaced.
I reckon a lot of these full kana games would be harder even for natives if they used a more standard space free style.
The people at Kanamoji Kai (all native speakers) are well aware of this too, and their website even has a section on 分かち書き (word separation). They use the example スモモ モ モモ、モモ モ モモ、モモ ニ モ イロイロ アル。 to illustrate that using spaces is a must if we switch to kana-based writing.
>> these full kana games would be harder even for natives if they used a more standard space-free style
This is true, but I take issue with your use of the word “more standard,” as USING SPACES IS THE STANDARD in full kana games.
Any form of writing reform, by definition, involves moving from the current standard to something that is initially non-standard, right? Korea got rid of kanji and now uses spaces with Hangul. In my opinion, it’s way easier to adapt than most people think.
In comparison, my mother language is Spanish, a language with very simple spelling rules. My girlfriend is always surprised how she can read out loud a random Spanish text and even though she doesn't understand it, I will understand her easily (it also helps that both languages have very similar sounds).
(For the reader, Japanese has a lot of homonyms since it has a comparatively limited set of phonemes. Specifically a problem in writing due to lack of context, spaces and lack of tonality that can help disambiguate the language when spoken)
The obvious way people handle it in speech is by picking words that are clearer in context when homonyms might cause confusion. If you consume any Japanese video content on YouTube etc, it’s very common for speakers to say a homonym, instantly notice the ambiguity, and restate it using a clearer word or brief explanation, which they could, at least in theory, do in no- or low-kanji writing too.
同音異義語の区別に不可欠な漢字の廃止は不可能か？(Is abolishing kanji -- which is essential for distinguishing homonyms -- impossible?)
So the most obvious solution would be to drop on'yomi (Chinese readings) and go to pure kun'yomi (Japanese readings) whenever possible. My understanding is that such a strategy was used by the Koreans to replace Hanja with Hangul.
Now, I understand that it would be a massive undertaking and extremely unlikely to ever happen, and honestly it's not really my problem, so I am just speculating here xD