Oh, I’m sorry. No it wasn’t a criticism at all. Your comment just made me think.. so it was more just me thinking out loud in a response. Haha.

Yeah traditional characters have been reformed (standardized) but it was usually for unification (mostly for ease of trade and government organization purposes). Which would probably be the same reason the Japanese didn’t abolish it. It was needed for communication during a period where their leaders and scientists (unit 731 & other sites) were spread throughout the whole Asia Pacific region.

The evolution of language is fascinating. I wonder if the Japanese had won, if kanji would have been phased out… I think that would have been slightly more probable. It wouldn’t make much sense to under go a whole language reform during empire building.

And yeah, 手纸 is toilet paper/letter in Chinese/Japanese. But if you break the word apart, it literally means “hand paper”. So given the context that it’s written you’d still be able to derive the correct meaning from it (and a bit of a laugh too probably). And even 込 komi: to include. If we pulled it apart into its original radicals, it’s 辶 and 入，which literally means walk in. So again if the character is in context, you would still be able to derive it’s meaning from its semantic indicators. Which takes us back to the OP question, this example of the evolution of kanji, to use the original Chinese semantic indicators to create their own vocabulary, is a great illustration of how deeply embedded kanji is and how difficult it would be to simply remove it.