>>88 If I ruled Japan, I'd make it so that written Japanese only had kana and no kanji.
I didn't read this thread at all, but I want to step in to say that this idea is retarded. Do you realize how impossible it would become to read or speak Japanese? How would you differentiate between the 15 different entries in the dictionary for たいしょう? Or the 18 entries for せいそう？ Sure, you've got the pitch-based accent to help you differentiate between the words, but half of all words in Japanese have no accent, which sort of ruins your plans from the get-go. Chinese characters are necessary for determining which homophone you're talking about. It's true that the only reason they have so many goddamn homophones is because they use kanji (if they never started using kanji, then they wouldn't have had any way to differentiate between the 15 different たいしょうs, and they would have come up with different words for them), but the fact of the matter is that Japanese uses kanji -- it's just the way it works -- and so removing kanji from the language would make it horribly difficult to figure out what people are saying or writing.

Morever, kanji help to delineate word boundaries. If I write 吾輩は猫である, it's easy to tell where the word start and stop, but if I write わがはいはねこである, it's a fucking jumble. Throw in homophones or similar-sounding words and it gets fucking crazy. Even simple sentences become a pain in the ass to read:

人間は死ぬ時、愛されたことを思い出す人と愛したことを思い出す人とに分かれる。
にんげんはしぬとき、あいされたことをおもいだすひととあいしたことをおもいだすひととにわかれる。

Yeah, fuck that bullshit, man. There's a reason that in children's books, where they don't use kanji, they put fucking spaces between the words. It's a goddamn clusterfuck otherwise.

Worst plan ever.