Brennus, actually, to be technical, Japanese *is* tonestressed, but the influence of tonestress is relatively minimal, in that it tends to distinguish only a relatively small number of minimal pairs, such as <hashi> (En <chopsticks>) and <hashi> (En <bridge>) (sorry, but I don't remember which syllable the stress is on in each of those). But yes, it is not truly tonal, unlike, say Mandarin and Cantonese.
Oh, and also, Japanese already has two parallel native syllabaries, Hiragana, for writing native words, and Katakana, for writing foreign words, but these Hiragana tends to be primarily used for marking grammar, which Chinese-style characters are not very good for due to being unable to effectively indicate Japanese grammatical forms themselves, due to Japanese's being agglutinative and not isolating. In this way, Chinese characters are *not* very useful in Japanese except for dealing with the significant numbers of homophones which exist in Japanese.
Travis, Travis, Travis!
You wrote: "Chinese characters are *not* very useful in Japanese except for dealing with the significant numbers of homophones which exist in Japanese."
This seems to be the conventional wisdom among most linguists and language scholars. Of course, rightly or wrongly, there are always a few people will disagree with any commonly held viewpoint.
Of course, there are lots of languages in the world that are written in scripts that are ill-suited for them. Linguists also point out Arabic for Persian and Urdu and the Indian-based scripts that Burmese and Thai are written in.
Brennus, I bet that one could ditch Kanji altogether in Japanese writing *if* diacritics for explicitly marking tonestress were added to Hiragana, *and* these diacritics were actually used in writing. This would cut down a lot of the apparent in-writing homophones, as a good number "homophones" in Japanese, like <hashi> and <hashi> are distinguished in speech by tonestress, even though if you wrote them using current Hiragana, they would look the same in text. Even still, you would still have a good number of words that could only be distinguished meaning-wise in context, due to being truely homophonic in nature.
Of course it is possible and perfectly correct to write only in kana. This is what they do in children's books. However, is it better? I don't believe that this would make Japanese easier to read (for native Japanese speakers, we non-native Japanese speakers don't count).
Ideographs have their advantages over phonemic spelling. I don't think it's merely because of tradition or pride that Japanese continue to use Chinese characters.
Reading is not just a matter of sounding things out: we look at the shapes of words. For example, in English the suffix <-ed> has three different pronunciations. Would we do well to spell it in three different ways? I don't think so.
Chinese character in Japanese are not all bad, besides, they tend to be a whole lot better to look at.
Of course it is possible and perfectly correct to write only in kana. This is what they do in children's books. However, is it better? I don't believe that this would make Japanese easier to read (for native Japanese speakers, we non-native Japanese speakers don't count).
why this ?
What exactly are you asking Paul?