[Alexander84]

I agree with robhol that this is a rather interesting subject. But I think it has gotten away from itself a little bit with immigration and political issues becoming a focus. Anyway, I just wanted to make a few observations on the linguistic side which people may find noteworthy.

The tendency for written language (and spoken) is historically towards simplification and communication efficiency. Current Kanji, in fact, already is "simplified Kanji" as are the two kana syllabaries, which were based on the same alphabet concept that moved hierogylphics through to a simplified alphabet. Hangul also was intentionally designed to increase literacy and linguistic fluency of the country, through the use of pronounceable units rather than understandable pictures.

The barriers to using kana exclusively have already been stated: hard to read, homophones, etc. But naturally there are ways that such problems could be tempered (punctuation.) More importantly, ways of handling such things would spontaneously develop, such as strengthening the tonal difference between homophones (like in Chinese) or a wider array of sounds in the Japanese language.

A previous post mentioned that Kanji study is good for your brain, to which I'll add that it probably benefits different regions of your brain than simplified alphabets because the picture-like characters probably stimulate visual sectors in addition to symbolic processing ones. Also, games featuring Kanji seem a bit more fun than English like counterparts. (Ex: draw all the Kanji you can using te-hen in a minute vs. write all the words you can using the latin prefix "contra-" in a minute.) However, such benefits have to be weighed against the negatives of Kanji use, since mentally stimulating things per se are not necessarily useful as societal customs (ex: Rubik's cube).

Obviously, the questions "should Japan do something...?" and "will Japan do something...?" and even "will this happen in Japan...?" are different. Japanese politicians and people probably have a much different idea of "What should Japan do" than I do, so clearly that depends on one's goals. I think most people here are in agreement that Japan will not do something drastic like banning Kanji, especially seeing as how they adore Kanji and seem to hold their language's purported difficulty to foreigners as a source of pride. However, increasing pressures to internationalize, and internal issues will probably force them to make further concessions to simplified writing in the near term.

I apologize for the length of this post.