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I would like to know why, in general, new words are imported (from English
among other languages) rather that created with respect to the concept/thing
they represent.

For example, "computer" could be written as 計算機 (the word exists but is not
common), the same would be true for words like "shower", "engine", "orchestra"
and many others.

What is even more confusing is that borrowed words may be preferred. The first
example that comes to my mind is smooth スムーズ which was formerly 円滑. 円滑 is
still used but スムーズ is far more common and it covers a broader range of
meanings.

To add to the previous paragraph, while 2-kanji-compound are often very
precise in meaning (and it is often useful to check the dictionary of synonym)
loaned words tends to have broader meanings.

This question has been nagging at me because the more I learn kanji the more I
find them useful, it is easy to parse a sentence with a lot of kanji (as long
as particles are not written with man'yougana though) and at the same time
since the meaning is somewhat encoded into the kanji it easier to grab the
meaning of the whole sentence.

On the other hand, since the borrowed word tend to keep their original
pronunciation and form they are written as katakana which is understandable
but at the same time it is more difficult to read/parse and the meaning is not
encoded in the written form of the word. The use of too much kana tends to
make Japanese much like any other language with an alphabet.

I am not advocating that Japanese should borrow words from Chinese (it would
nevertheless be a solution), but I am wondering why not like the Chinese
creates new words conceptually from existing kanji. (In the first example I
gave 計算機 is not the Chinese word for computer which is 電腦 most of the time and
計算機 sometimes.)
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words kanji loanwords
Why importing words from other languages rather than building new ones from existing kanji?
Here's a question: are you sure that your characterisation of the situation is
accurate? Are all, or the majority, of new words in Japanese created by
importation from other languages? Do you have any statistics about this?

It's often relatively obvious to English speakers when we see a katakana word
imported from English, but how do you know you're not seeing recently coined
kanji compounds, or repurposed kanji compounds, or recent imports from
Chinese? By 'repurposed' I mean when older words are given new meanings, just
as "computer" did not originally mean a machine.

Since I didn't have the answers to those questions off the top of my head, I
tried to find some data for you.
[This](http://ir.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/ja/list/doctoral_thesis/%E5%8D%9A%E5%A3%AB%28%E5%AD%A6%E8%A1%93%29/item/36447)
is a recent PhD thesis comparing neologisms in Japanese and Korean. I can't
speak to the parts of it that involve Korean, but if you look at page 39
there's a table which suggests that by the measure of this research, only
about 25% of 新語{しんご} (neologisms) from 2001 to 2010 are actually 外来語{がいらいご}.
The largest part (~40%) are actually mixed words - 混種語{こんしゅご}

Keep going to page 59, and you'll see a breakdown of these - the majority are
a combination of a foreign word and kanji. So 迷惑{めいわく}メール (rather than スパム),
サイバー犯罪{はんざい} (rather than サイバークライム), and so on.

It can also be that the impression we get of how many new katakana words there
are from the specific things we are reading. For example, looking at the
[少納言](http://www.kotonoha.gr.jp/shonagon/search_form) corpus, I don't think
it's true that スムーズ is far more common than 円滑. ([This meta
question](https://japanese.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/522/) on Google
counts may be of relevance).

The final thing to consider is whether all uses of foreign-origin words count
as "importation". Do you count every time somebody makes up a new sort of パン
as re-importation of a foreign word? 米パン is arguably a case of this - a
relatively new term (or at least, recently popular), made by combining two
Japanese words - 米 & パン.

I think the actual answer is: people create words according to their
requirements at the time. There are no set rules, and attempting to impose
rules rarely actually works (ask the French about _le jogging_ and other _faux
anglicismes_ ).

If someone imported a word and transliterated it rather than inventing one, it
was because it was there and it seemed like the easiest option at the time, or
because they thought it sounded cool/modern, or because they wanted to avoid
specific connections/connotations which might have come with using existing
words in Japanese (計算機 implies "calculator" more than it does "computer"), or
for some other reason that escapes me for the moment.
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answer