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What if sometime after world war two, as a way to democratize Japan the US occupational forces abolished the previously used writing systems. IOTL there was some talk of doing this as it was felt that the use of the previous system(s) was holding back the average Japanese from being literate. What happened OTL was that it was found that most people knew how the systems worked and it was decided to simply stick with the established systems.
But what if that was not how it went down? What if instead of sticking with the three separate written forms of Japanese the American occupational forces decided to try to wipe out any vestiges of the old ways and cut the modern Japan off from its past.
What would the ramifications be for Japan following this? How would she be viewed by the rest of Asia if Japanese was written in a Roman alphabet rather than the more typical Asian scripts? And what would the US Japanese relations ship likely be like?
This is just an example of Kani and all its symbols to give you an idea of the complexity of the Language. For a non native user it is crazy difficult (Chinese still beats it easily though from what I hear)