Well, Japan does have katakana, which has moved a bit towards being more alphabet-like via 'little characters'. For example, there's no 'fo' sound in Japanese

Well, Japan does have katakana, which has moved a bit towards being more alphabet-like via 'little characters'. For example, there's no 'fo' sound in Japanese (as in 'fork'), so you can't represent it using either kanji or one of the two syllabaries (hiragana or katakana). The closest you can come is 'フオク', which would be pronounced 'fuoku'. But, you can modify the vowel in katakana with a 'little letter', giving you the common way to say 'fork': フォーク, which sounds very similar to the English pronunciation. It's not a true alphabet, because you still can't whip together unpronounceable crap like we can do in English, but it's better than having no way to represent out-of-language sounds.