> You mention they have a separate phonetic alphabet to describe kanji? I know I'm barking up the wrong tree, but why not abandon kanji and just use the phonetic alphabet?

It is tradition + cultural pride, and cost of switching. It's worth noting that in the modern era, governments of almost all countries that traditionally used Chinese characters for writing undertook massive reforms to limit their use.

* In Vietnam, French colonization forcibly replaced the traditional education system, and along with that introduced the Latin script for writing.

* In Korea, Hangul was invented by one of its kings, with the letterforms created from an abstract representation of the oral organs that are exercised in creating each particular sound, nevertheless, the script it only really took off centuries later alongside a growing Korean nationalism.

* In Japan, a phonetic alphabet developed that can be written in two styles (think capital/small letters); one from components of Chinese characters, the other from cursive writing of those characters. There were certainly proposals to eliminate Chinese characters, but what happened was that the number of Chinese characters in publications that could be used in publications without being accompanied by a phonetic spelling was limited to a couple thousand, and this persists to this day. Note that Japanese names are allowed to draw from a much larger repertoire of characters.

* In communist China, under communist influence, the government embarked on a project of simplifications of Chinese characters, with possibly an objective of reforming it to a phonetic alphabet. The first round of simplifications were based on common shorthand and cursive styles. The second round incorporated more drastic simplifications with less precedent, and it failed miserably, and the Chinese abandoned the project.

* Hong Kong and Taiwan did not seem to have embarked on any simplification project. There probably exists some pride at continuing to use traditional characters.

In all these countries, resistance to reform came from the literati, for which knowledge of Chinese characters were a shibboleth for elitism. Two arguments are frequently trotted out:

* One is that Chinese characters helped to distinguish homonyms. But investigating the situation in Vietnam and Korea, this is likely to be quite unimportant in clear communication. I suppose that this is because context will make clear in most instances, and use of synonyms should make up for the others.

* Another is that a change of script would cut one off from their existing literature. But already, the respective languages have changed so much that modern readers cannot read ancient texts without a lot of guidance and learning new meaning.

Interestingly, in modern Japan, there exists an problem with kanji familiarity, and I think this phenomenon is growing in China too. More and more people are forgetting how to write Chinese characters, even though they can recognize them perfectly. How one enters kanji into computers is by entering the phonetic pronunciation, and using computer software to identify the correct characters to convert them to. So you can see that one no longer creates the character from memory very much anymore, and when you don't practice it you lose it.

If you look at historical context, the reforms were always associated with westernization and nationalism. I think that if Japan were to seriously consider reform to a completely phonetic script, it would be by associating with the phonetic script a notion of national pride. In this respect the Japanese phonetic scripts hold less promise than Hangul, for while the former is a derivative of chinese letterforms, the latter was created by a national king, no less, and based rationally on depicting fundamental linguistic phenomena.

P.S. y'all Americans should adopt metric.