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I'm a beginner.

People argue for Kanji being that it helps disambiguate homophones in written
Japanese, but in spoken Japanese, kanji (or any other visual aid) are not
available, yet people seem to know the difference between [話]{はな}す, [離]{はな}す,
[放]{はな}す, [映]{は}える, 生{は}える, and so forth. So why are Kanji necessary to
disambiguate homophones if people know how to disambiguate them in spoken
Japanese where Kanji aren't available? And can the same thing be applied to
written Japanese?

In that case, why can't I write 私は学生です as わたしはがくせいです or use spaces like
わたし_は_がくせい_です ? Or use pitch accent markers in writing like
[わたしはがくせいです]{LHHLHLHLHL} (I don't know if this pitch accent notation is
correct), or add furigana above particle markers to indicate their
pronunciation (like [は]{わ} and [を]{お}), or a combination of these? In short,
why are Kanji necessary?
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kanji homophonic-kanji furigana pitch-accent written-language
If Kanji are necessary to disambiguate homophones, how come it's still used, being that Japanese people seem to know the difference when speaking?
This is definitely a bit harder for native English speakers to pick up on at
first, but sometimes homophones in Japanese are distinguishable by the pitch
accent. So some of them aren't an issue at all. But of course some words do
sound exactly the same. So how do you tell those apart? Easy: context.

Kanji aren't "necessary" to distinguish between homophones; they just help a
bit in written text where you don't have pitch accent to help you. In reality,
you don't technically need kanji at all. If you wrote a long essay in nothing
but kana, everyone would be able to read it, albeit a bit slower. Since
traditionally-written Japanese has no spaces, sometimes it can take a bit of
closer reading to figure out when one word starts and another stops; but even
to learners and especially to native speakers, this isn't too hard. In fact,
it's not even unique to Japanese; back in the day, classical Latin and ancient
Greek were also written without any spaces between words, and they managed
just fine.

You mentioned using spaces as well; this is also something Japanese writers
will do if they are writing in all kana. For example, all of the Pokemon games
are written in nothing but kana because they knew lots of young kids would be
playing it (though newer games do have an option to use kanji instead). In
these games, words are actually separated by spaces, like you would see in
Western writing. Note that in this case, particles like は and を, etc., are
attached to the word they are modifying, not treated as a separate word or
anything. Also, I'm not really sure why people would write わ as furigana over
は when literally everyone knows that's how to read it. Additionally, を isn't
always identical to お; there are still times when the pronunciations are
distinct.

EDIT: Just to show what I'm talking about, here's Professor Oak asking if
you're a boy or a girl.

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/j94wY.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/j94wY.png)
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Thinking briefly, I think that there is no problem even if we have no kanji in
Japanese to disambiguate homophones or homonyms as OP thinks , but in fact we
need kanji.

In conversation, not in writing, it is quite natural that people in the
conversation hope the conversation goes smoothly. Therefore, we usually avoid
using words that might cause ambiguities to listeners like homonyms. Also,
just after a homonym we used, we often complement the ambiguity with another
word or expression similar to the homonym. In addition, when a listener
wonders in what meaning of multiple meanings of a homonym, the listener would
ask unknown points to the other party. Furthermore, when speaking, if we think
that the partner in the conversaion has misunderstood the homonym we used, we
will try to resolve the misunderstanding soon with another expression.

In this way, there are many advantageous conditions in conversation different
from writing, so homonyms can be used without kanji even in conversation.

As the conclusion, therefore, it is not possible to discuss whether kanji is
necessary or not for homonyms because conversation and writing are not used
under the same condition.
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# Kanji aren't necessary to write Japanese

Your rationale is correct; Japanese is a living, spoken language; people are
able to understand each other by sound only, therefore a writing system based
on sound _has_ to be sufficient.

Some commentators have mentioned that Japanese speakers often allude to kanji
when talking. That's true enough (and it probably reflects something deep
about how the mental lexicon is organized¹); but explicit references to kanji
remain a minor cultural fact, not a necessary feature of the language. There
exists blind people in Japan, for example; the congenitally blind will never
have seen a single kanji, and they're nonetheless fluent Japanese speakers. As
a Brazilian, I've personally met several Japanese-Brazilians who learned the
language from birth, but who never learned the writing system; they could
interact with native Japanese people just fine (who'd often be surprised to
learn they were born in Brazil), and I'll go ahead and assert they're native
speakers, too. One does not _have_ to know kanji to be a Japanese speaker.

We also have several types of sound-based, Japanese text works, so we know it
can be done. @Kurausukun's example of children-oriented videogames (and
children's books, etc.) is a good point. Other examples would include
historical _kana_ literature of the Heian period; Ishikawa Takuboku's _Rômazi
Nikki_ (written in Latin characters to prevent his wife from reading it – but
easily readable by any Japanese speaker nowadays); and publications by
associations like the various [Rômazi-kai](http://www.age.ne.jp/x/ork/) or
[Kana-moji-kai](http://www.kanamozi.org/).

# Pitch accent isn't necessary to understand Japanese either

@Kurausukun and others have mentioned the common argument that pitch accent is
necessary for sound-based understanding. It's true that standard Tokyo
Japanese distinguishes many words by accent alone (like the famous three-way
distinction between _HÁshì-gà_ = "the chopsticks"; _hàSHÍ-gà_ = "the bridge";
_hàSHÍ-GÁ_ = "the edge"). And true, it's a damn shame that they aren't usually
marked in writing; accented rōmaji is, in my opinion, a severely underrated
tool for beginning foreign students, and I wish it was the norm.

One has to keep in mind, however, that the "homogeneity" of Japanese is a
myth. The country has a large number of distinct dialects, and pitch accent in
particular varies a lot between them (I'm doing research on accent, and I'd
say the amount of variation from _the same speaker_ is already significant…).
Some areas, including e.g. most of Fukushima or Miyazaki, feature no pitch
accent at all (無型アクセント). Given that people from these areas can understand
each other, and that in general a Tokyoite can understand an Osaka comedian
without much trouble despite their accents being unpredictably different, it
has to be the case that pitch accent in writing isn't essential.

This should come as no surprise, since language is notoriously resilient. Tone
in Chinese is responsible for a lot more important distinctions than accent in
Japanese, and yet Chinese people can read _pīnyīn_ (Chinese romaji) without
tone marks, and often don't bother writing them. Vowels are certainly an
important part of the English language, but yuu cuuld wrutu wuthuut vuwul
dustunctuns und stull bu undurstuud must uf thu tumu.

# Written Japanese is different than spoken Japanese

That being said, there are still some reasons why Japanese people feel so
strongly that kanji are important.

The first of them is that the vocabulary of written Japanese isn't the same as
the spoken language. To understand this, you have to switch your point of view
inside out. It's not that Japanese has so many homophones that it needs kanji
to be written. This is exactly backwards; what happens is that kanji
**allows** one to write with lots of homophones, and _therefore_ Japanese
writing (and only writing) can use more homophones than normal. The same is
true of Literary Chinese, the (artificial, written) language for which kanji
were designed.² Chinese, too, is a spoken language (actually a large family of
spoken languages), and as such is perfectly understandable by sound alone.
However, the Literary version was a kind of super-condensed Chinese that
relied on the characters as support. Reading Literary Chinese aloud wouldn't
always result in something intelligible (unlike natural, spoken Chinese).

A big source of those Japanese homophones are precisely loanwords from that
homophone-heavy Literary Chinese; these Chinese-style words are called _kango_
in Japan. Typical spoken Japanese has about 23% of _kango_ ; typical written
Japanese has some 41%—almost double as much.³ The more formal, intellectual or
specialized the language, the more it tends to use _kango_.

Due to this difference, if you just blindly convert a text made for kanji into
kana or rōmaji, the result often feels clunky and hard to read. The proper
thing to do would be to replace _kango_ vocabulary, bringing the written
language closer to speech; this is called _iikae_ by Japanese researchers.⁴ If
the text is written without using kanji from the outset, the writer will
instinctively choose adequate vocabulary, and _iikae_ isn't necessary.

# Kanji can be cool

Finally, I think it's important to keep in mind that, just because kanji are
not _necessary_ , it doesn't mean they don't add something. Reading kanji text
_feels_ different, and there are neurolinguistic reasons for that.⁵ And this
means that the use of kanji has æsthetic, cultural, and subjective value.

Through their entire history, the tendency of the Japanese as a culture was
never to try and make their writing simple and utilitarian, but rather to
experiment, play, innovate with it. They could just have used _kana_ or
_bonji_ phonetic characters for everything since a thousand years ago – indeed
Heian kana literature was an experiment with this – but opted instead to keep
using kanji, and not only that, but to assign multiple readings to them, and
mix them with kana in many ways. The resulting system has always been explored
creatively, to create many effects; not just in fancy works like the
_Man'yōshū_ (almost a puzzle-set of script play), but also in popular things
like Edo-era folk literature or modern-day visual culture.

When Natsume Sōseki writes _tonikaku_ as 兎に角, or _yakamashii_ as 八釜しい, for
example, he's making a kind of game with the reader, sharing a sort of
intimacy with them. When Anzai Fuyue writes a poem about a butterfly like
this—

> てふてふが一匹韃靼海峡を渡って行った  
>  A butterfly is travessing the Strait of Tartar and—gone.

—he's using the cognitive weight of kanji characters to cause an effect
similar to what Western poets usually do with consonants and obstruents.
Natsuhiko Kyōgoku, a writer of detective fiction, relies heavily on archaic
kanji and unusual furigana for atmosphere; he'd lose a lot if merely converted
to kana. All sorts of linguistic and æsthetic effects can be created with the
inventive interplay of kanji and kana and furigana…

[![No Game no Life
"kuuhaku"](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Aw6Bo.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Aw6Bo.png)
[![Tokyo Tabearu-
ki](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MJ7VV.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MJ7VV.png)
[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/s1Pbf.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/s1Pbf.png)
[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Kj5bs.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Kj5bs.jpg)

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zSIh9.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zSIh9.jpg)
[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wPcOD.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wPcOD.jpg)

…and this sort of thing is _extremely_ common. It doesn't occur just in
elevated poems and classical literature, but happens right now in the most
popular of forms: in manga, in videogames, in advertisements, in song lyrics,
in baby naming… So I'd claim that the Japanese have a living, thriving culture
of kanji, and I find it perfectly reasonable that they consistently reject the
idea of killing it.

References:

  1. Terry Joyce, _Modeling the Japanese Mental Lexicon_ (& further research).
  2. Victor Mair, [_Buddhism and the rise of the written vernacular in East Asia_](http://www.jstor.org/stable/2059728).
  3. Miyaji and Kai. 「日本語学」特集テーマ別ファイル 語彙３：語種論／和語。
  4. Sachiko Matsunaga. _The linguistic and psycholinguistic nature of kanji_.
  5. Zev Handel. _Logography and the classification of writing systems: a response to Unger._
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Stop signs could also be just the word "STOP" written on a white rectangular
sign, but would you argue the necessity of using a RED octagon? Probably, not,
because human brains recognize shapes faster than words that we have to read
to our selves and then get the meaning. Native English speakers can skim
thuorgh lines of text beaucse they are able to recgnoize words by their
gerneal shapes.

However in Japanese language that does not have spaces, they need other forms
of grouping characters that only represent a certain sound, into something
with a context. Conveniently, there is a language that has been doing that for
quite a long time, hence Chinese. So Japanese borrowed some characters that
have similar meaning or pronunciation and assigned the Hiragana to them (hey
at least that's what I think happened, THIS IS NOT A FACT, CHINESE/JAPANESE
DON'T KILL ME)

Personally, as a Chinese that studied Japanese, I find myself reading at least
5 times slower if I'm reading texts for "beginners" or "kids", because I would
have to read the Hiragana in my head and then recognize the context by the
sound (PS: not related but Romaji are the worst, I have to translate to
Japanese then do the things). While with Kanji I can skim though the general
"shape" of the character and know the meaning, just like knowing red light
means stop.
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Most everyone's answers are correct, but I wanted to bring up one useful
aspect of kanji which I don't think has been brought up. It may be limited to
learners like me, but many times when I encounter new words in kanji (in
manga, online, paper forms at the doctor's office, etc...) I've found that I
can understand what is being conveyed even without knowing how to pronounce
that word because I know what the kanji mean.

In a recent example, a native Japanese friend was helping me with
understanding a dentist form, and didn't know the English phrase "receding gum
line." I had no idea what the word for "gums" even was in Japanese, but I saw
歯肉 ("tooth" and "meat" or "flesh"), and I immediately could understand that we
were talking about gums, which helped us figure it out.

If this had all been written in kana, and I didn't know what しにく meant already
-- or if I were speaking to someone over the phone and only heard the word --
it would have taken more time and more explanation, and possibly a dictionary.
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