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I’m afraid that you misunderstand the chronology. The development of the writing system in Japan postdates the Yayoi immigration by several centuries at least.
by Mediterraneo10 6y ago
I’m afraid that you misunderstand the chronology. The development of the writing system in Japan postdates the Yayoi immigration by several centuries at least. The original immigrants from mainland Asia brought no writing system with them. Japanese writing is the result of later adoption of Chinese writing by Japan’s learned elites. Any introduction to Old Japanese orthography will explain how this happened.
- kazinator 6y agoI'm afraid you're fishing for assertions in my comment which are not actually there. For one thing, I make no remarks about any writing system at all, let alone any specific timeline regarding the development of literacy.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoEven without attributing the Chinese writing system to the immigrants from China, your post above does not contribute to the discussion. Japanese is genetically unrelated to Chinese and typologically different from it. What the Yayoi immigrants from the mainland originally brought with them bore no resemblance to the Chinese language. That the Japanese were able to use Chinese words and Chinese characters for their own purposes and some similarities between the two languages arose as the OP mentions, has absolutely nothing to do with pre-Proto-Japonic speakers coming from the mainland. All that meaningful Chinese–Japanese interaction happened many centuries later.